High stakes, low bar for human rights

Harris O. Schoenberg
March 6, 2006
The Boston Globe
Original Source: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/letters/articles/2006/03/06/high_stakes_low_bar_for_human_rights/

THE DRAFT proposal for a Human Rights Council (''Better UN rights monitor, editorial, Feb. 25) was unveiled as a blueprint to replace the discredited Commission on Human Rights and as a centerpiece of UN reform. But how can it be a centerpiece when it barely reforms anything?
Would the proposed council meet all year long instead of the six weeks the commission meets? No, it would be mandated to meet for just 10 weeks. Would it meet in New York where it could interact with other councils? No, it would meet in Geneva, as the commission did.
Would the council be streamlined to 20 members from 53, as envisioned, so that it could include only members committed to human rights? No, it would only go down in size to 47 members.
At least, would the gross violators of human rights be kept out? On the contrary -- firm criteria for membership in the council were dropped, and human rights abusers could expect to be well represented through retention of a discredited system of regional rotation. It would take a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly merely to suspend them; they could not be removed.
Would the special rapporteur system, which the draft proposes to review but keep, help ensure respect for human rights? This system has been abused both by stacking it in order to minimize its impact and by appointing rapporteurs who have politicized their mandates or blamed victims of human rights abuses for their treatment. There is no guarantee that the new system will be an improvement.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said, ''Unless we remake our human rights machinery, we may be unable to renew public confidence in the United Nations itself. The stakes and expectations are too high to agree to the least common denominator.
HARRIS O. SCHOENBERG 
New York 
The writer is president of UN Reform Advocates and adjunct professor of human rights at New York University.