Nay-saying at the UN

March 10, 2006
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/07064c22-afda-11da-b417-0000779e2340.html

Kofi Annan is putting the last year of his rather chequered term as United Nations secretary-general to good use by pushing reforms to the UN's internal management and to its human rights machinery. But he has run into surprising opposition from the US to his proposal for a new Human Rights Council that now has the support, or acquiescence, of almost all the UN's other 190 member states. Unless this impasse is broken, there will be the sorry picture of the UN's discredited Commission on Human Rights starting its regular annual session in Geneva on Monday with no successor body approved.
Bizarrely, the US does not deny that the proposed council would be some improvement over the current commission on which such blatant human rights violators as Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe have sat. At present, countries often get on to the commission as the result of back-room deals inside the UN's regional groupings. Under the proposed reform, there could still be regional slates of candidates, but each would also have to win approval from at least 96 countries, an absolute majority of the UN membership. Nor could any government, once on the council, expect to escape or block peer scrutiny of its own record; the proposed council would sit for longer during the year than the commission to help it carry out a universal periodic review of every country.
But this is not good enough for the US. Its UN ambassador, John Bolton, says he will not brook any compromise on human rights and that only the highest standards will suffice. On the threshold for election to the council, this means approval by two-thirds of UN members, as originally proposed. Anything less would be a sham, say US officials, and if US views are ignored, Washington will withdraw its presence and funding from the new body.
This makes no practical sense. The world needs a reputable form of scrutiny of human rights that involves governments as well as UN specialist investigators and non-governmental organisations. The latter do essential fact-finding, but their views often carry little weight with governments; look how lightly Washington dismissed UN and NGO criticism of its Guantánamo prison camp. The proposed human rights council stands a better chance of exerting peer pressure on rights-violating governments than the existing UN body. The US may claim it still to be a sham. But, on its own argument, it concedes that rejecting the lesser sham would allow the greater sham to continue. The only possible logic must be it wants to set the UN up for failure.