Rethinking UN reform 

By Newt Gingrich and George Mitchell 
March 13, 2006
International Herald Tribune
Original Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/13/opinion/ednewt.php

http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?query=&sort=swishrankWe have worked together during the past year to promote reform of the United Nations in the common belief that an effective and capable organization could be a force for achieving Eleanor Roosevelt's hope that the United Nations would be a guiding beacon along the way to the achievement of human rights and fundamental freedoms throughout the world.

The congressionally mandated task force we jointly led recommended abolishing the discredited UN Human Rights Commission in favor of a new Human Rights Council, ideally composed of democracies, recognizing that democratic governments offer the best protection of human rights.

We are gratified that the UN General Assembly recently proposed abolishing the commission, and is now taking the first steps to define its replacement. But we cannot embrace the design of the new council that has been put forward.

In our report to Congress, we concluded that a major component of UN reform must be repair of the UN human rights system. We found that the Human Rights Commission had become so distorted that countries with appalling, even monstrous, human rights records - Sudan, Syria, Zimbabwe, Libya, and Cuba, to name a few - could all be seated there. We believed that the situation had deteriorated to the point that the commission was failing at its primary task: monitoring, promoting, and enforcing human rights.

But the plan offered by the General Assembly does not do enough to redress these weaknesses, and is inadequate for several reasons.

First, it does not provide enforceable standards for membership. We recognize that in an international institution like the UN - which has no democratic preconditions for membership - there will always be limits to America's ability to render its infrastructure and decisions compatible with American values and interests. Nevertheless our task force recognized the fundamental importance of denying membership in the UN body charged with the protection of human rights to any states under UN sanctions and/or states unwilling to accept monitoring missions. We stand by our task force recommendation.

Second, the proposed council will be dominated by regional groupings. The plan emphasizes equitable geographic distribution, apportioning the 47 seats among the various regional groups, which shifts the balance of membership away from Western democracies.

Our task force made it clear that the United States should oppose any efforts by regional groupings to nominate members of the council solely on the basis of rotation, which would be likely to sacrifice the fundamental values of human rights to regional consensus and political solidarity. We also advocated a smaller council than the 53-member commission. We stand by our recommendations: A new council should be smaller still.

Third, the plan provides that election to the council will be by a simple majority vote of the General Assembly through a secret ballot. This is a major step backward from Secretary General Kofi Annan's original proposal - supported by the United States - that called for a two-thirds majority vote for membership. This weakness of the plan, more than any other aspect, would ensure that the new council would not be sufficiently different from the commission.

Finally, the plan requires a two-thirds vote for removal of members, making it impractical to remove human rights violators from the council. Considering that 50 percent of the General Assembly could not even agree that Sudan was guilty of human rights violations in November, this provision holds little hope that human rights violators will be removed from the council should they get on. Instead of erecting a high bar for membership, the current plan would erect one for removal. This is exactly backwards.

Eleanor Roosevelt said the field of human rights is not one in which compromises on fundamental principles are possible. Unfortunately, the proposed compromise put forward for the Human Rights Council does not adequately address the core institutional problem with the current commission - the requirement to keep human rights violators off the council, while keeping human rights defenders on.

We call on the United States to mount a major diplomatic effort at the United Nations and in the capitals of the world's other democracies, to press for a strong and effective Human Rights Council that lives up to the UN's founding principles. 

(Newt Gingrich is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and George Mitchell is a former U.S. Senate majority leader.)