The (UN-)Human Rights Council By Joseph Klein March 13, 2006 FrontPageMagazine.com Original Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21618 According to Jimmy Carter, the United States is wrong to oppose the new United Nations Human Rights Council as it is presently proposed. Calling this replacement for the widely discredited UN Commission on Human Rights a victory of “principles over politics,” Carter declared in a recent New York Times Op-Ed article (March 5, 2006) that “the draft before United Nations members represents a very significant and meaningful improvement over the existing commission”. Carter has even gone so far as to assure the leaders of other member states – including such human rights ‘stalwarts’ as Cuba, Egypt and Pakistan - that the United States would not get its way on the new Human Rights Council. Leaving aside whether Carter has improperly interfered as a private citizen in foreign diplomacy matters reserved to the duly authorized representatives of the United States government, he has once again demonstrated the wrong-headedness that so dominated his own conduct of foreign policy as President. The current UN Commission on Human Rights has long since been taken over by the very serial human rights abusing countries whose egregious conduct it should be condemning. There are no standards at all to qualify for membership on the Commission – or as a member of the United Nations itself, for that matter. The result has been an Alice in Wonderland world in which past and current Commission member dictatorships like China, Libya, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe have received no more than a slap on the wrist for their barbarous behavior while they manage to concentrate the UN’s resources on slamming true democracies like the United States and Israel.   Even Kofi Annan finally got fed up with this huge embarrassment to the already tattered credibility of the United Nations. In early 2005, he recommended that a new human rights organization be established with procedures that would effectively bar human rights abusers from membership. The purpose was to protect the UN’s human rights role against manipulation by those who had become quite adept at gaming the system to their advantage. However, after many months of negotiation, what came out of the sausage factory of UN resolution drafting is no better than what we have now.   Predictably, Annan is willing to take whatever he can get. “I think we should not let the better be the enemy of the good,” he told reporters on February 27, 2006 while defending the compromises that watered down any protections against another takeover by the barbarians at the gate. Thankfully, our UN Ambassador John Bolton is not so easily persuaded. He knows that evil is the enemy of the good, and that evil would be perpetuated under the proposed compromises because many of the protective steps necessary to ensure a viable human rights organization have been eliminated or watered down. Consequently, the United States wants to either reopen negotiations in hopes of revising the text or, alternatively, to have the General Assembly postpone a decision on the Council for several months so that it can be considered in conjunction with final approval of the UN’s biennial budget.   This is not a nit-picking exercise, as some supporters of the new Human Rights Council have suggested. Any country - no matter how bad its human rights record may be - would qualify as a member of the new Human Rights Council. Carter, Annan and various human rights activist groups such as Amnesty International are all agog that, for the first time in UN human rights history, a country’s human rights record would be “taken into account” in the election of a Council member by the General Assembly. Taken into account? That is like saying that the criminal conviction record of a serial child abuser would be taken into account – but not be treated as absolutely conclusive - in deciding whether or not to hire that individual as your child’s babysitter.   Any country with a record of severe, systematic human rights abuses should be automatically disqualified from membership, and evidence of new or continued human rights abuses by any country which makes it onto the Council should be grounds for automatic removal. That is not likely to happen as long as the current proposal calls for only a majority of the General Assembly to elect a member state to serve on the Human Rights Council while it takes a two thirds vote of the General Assembly to get an offending country removed. Exactly the opposite voting procedure should govern – two thirds approval to get on the Council and a majority vote to remove.   As Mark Lagon (U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs) explained, the United States is unwilling “to settle for something that is just a change in name and schedule. The United States wants to make sure the procedures for electing members and for disqualifying the most bloodthirsty regimes in the world are established so that we turn a page in the history of the Commission on Human Rights -- which has done much good but which has lost credibility by becoming a body of not just firefighters but arsonists. As if the diluted voting procedures of the new Human Rights Council were not bad enough, its anti-democracy composition is even worse. The driving principle is what its architects call equitable geographic distribution. The net result will be to skew the 47 seats on the new Council as follows:   13 seats to Africa (which include as possible candidates Sudan, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Uganda and other notorious human rights abusers who have been members of the current Commission on Human Rights); 13 seats to Asia and the Middle East (which include as possible candidates the paragon of human rights abuse, China, and the host of repressive dictatorships in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria who have been members of the current Commission on Human Rights); 8 seats to Latin America (which include the socialist regimes of Cuba and Venezuela); 6 seats to Eastern Europe; and 7 seats to the combined grouping of West European countries and what the UN refers to as the “Others Group”. The “Others Group” includes the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In other words, the grouping of countries that would be least represented on the new Council (15%) also happen to be made up of the largest collection of functioning democracies. The countries included in the categories of Africa, Asia and the Middle East together would have 55% of the Council seats while only about 21% of all such countries were rated “free” in 2005 according to Freedom House.   Reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”, true democracies are somehow considered a lower order of being in the dysfunctional institution that the United Nations has become. The serial human rights abusing autocracies will continue to dominate the new Human Rights Council, much as they have dominated the discredited Commission on Human Rights that it is supposed to replace. Sudan – under sanction by the Security Council for its gross human rights violations – is a member of the current Commission and could easily be re-elected to membership on the new Council. Meanwhile, with the implacable opposition of the powerful Islamic bloc of member states, Israel has not been a member of the Commission since 1970. According to statistics compiled for the year 2005 by the UN watchdog organization, Eye on the UN, Israel was subject to more UN human rights negative actions (such as critical General Assembly resolutions) than any other country – 50% more than the number directed against Sudan and more than six times the number directed against Iran!   That bias is not likely to change under the new regime because the same old players will continue to run the show.   Kofi Annan and the General Assembly president who put together the compromise proposal, Jan Eliasson of Sweden, have pressed for its immediate approval by the General Assembly. They have resisted calls by the United States to reopen discussion of the text, although the March 10, 2006 deadline for seeking General Assembly approval was put off for at least a week. Bolton admits that he faces an uphill battle in persuading other countries that the current proposal is seriously deficient. To mollify the United States and win our support, some countries have reportedly offered to provide Washington with side assurances that they would vote to keep offending member states off of the Human Rights Council. But Bolton wants to address the problem directly by fixing the text of the resolution establishing the Council, and he is right to press on. This phony repackaging is worse than no reform at all.   The UN uses the “human rights” label to justify virtually every social engineering and global wealth redistribution scheme that it hatches. Meanwhile, to this day, the General Assembly has been unable to reach a consensus on how to define “terrorism”. The new Council is all about polishing the UN’s human rights image without making any real substantive changes. That way, when the next UN-sponsored report condemning Israel or the United States is issued under the auspices of the ‘reformed’ Council, it will supposedly carry more weight in the eyes of the world than when issued by the discredited Commission on Human Rights that the Council will have replaced.   At the same time, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (“OIS”) is intent on using the new Council as one means of insinuating the moral values of Sharia (Islamic religious law) into international law. In the words of the OIS’ Ten-Year Programme Of Action  To Meet The Challenges Facing The Muslim Ummah In The 21st Century adopted in December 2005, the Muslim heads of state will “endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments.” In other words, they seek to criminalize insults to Islam as part of international law – a direct threat to modern democratic values of freedom of expression, press and religion. Their power in the General Assembly and in the new Council would give them a huge headstart in their endeavors as well as the ability to avoid responsibility for the murderous acts of terrorism conducted in the name of Islam.   The Council is also supposed to follow up on commitments supposedly coming out of the multitude of UN-sponsored global conferences and summits. Paid for out of the UN budget to which we contribute 22% (while China, for example, only contributes 2%), these unelected, unaccountable conferences and summits regularly issue high-minded pronouncements that purportedly establish new enforceable “international norms”, “universal human rights” and “universal entitlements”. These pronouncements are often at variance with our own values as a sovereign, self-governing nation. Nevertheless, a majority of today’s Supreme Court Justices have displayed an alarming tendency to incorporate these chimerical manifestations of ‘international law’ into their interpretations of our own Constitution in order to bring our Constitution into line with the consensus of world opinion. Imagine how susceptible these Supreme Court Justices will be to the siren call of a refurbished Human Rights Council claiming a new mandate of legitimacy to define human rights however they wish as part of international law. The United States should continue to stand on principle and insist on true reform. If we lose this battle and the new Council is approved by the General Assembly over our protest, we should carefully monitor the Council’s record during the next several months. If we see any evidence of more ‘business-as-usual’, we should immediately withdraw all funding that we contribute to this farce and to all of its spin-off conferences, forums, investigations, reports, etc. until meaningful change is put into effect.