U.N. Votes To Replace Rights Panel
U.S. Has Objections But Will Aid Agency

By Colum Lynch
March 16, 2006
The Washington Post
Original Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/15/AR2006031500410.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 15 -- The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to create a human rights agency to monitor and expose abuses by governments, replacing a discredited body despite objections by the United States that nations with a history of human rights violations could still join the new panel.
The assembly's action will effectively abolish the United Nations' main human rights body, which has been derided in recent years for allowing some of the world's worst rights abusers to participate. It will be replaced in June by a new Human Rights Council, which advocates and most nations hope will exclude brutal dictatorships and do a better job of confronting governments that abuse their own people.
The measure creating the 43-member rights body was passed by a vote of 170 to 4, with the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voting against it. Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstained, citing a concern that the council would become a tool for powerful Western countries to punish poor nations.
In a shift in U.S. policy, the Bush administration agreed Wednesday to help fund the rights council and has begun an internal discussion over possible U.S. membership. John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a staunch critic of the new council, said that though Washington opposed it, the United States will pledge support for making it as strong and effective as it can be.
We remain committed to support the U.N.'s historic mission to promote and protect the basic human rights of all the world's citizens, Bolton said. The real test will be the quality of membership that emerges on this council and whether it takes effective action to address serious human rights abuse cases like Sudan, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Burma.
The debate over the new human rights agency had put the United States in a difficult position. Under President Bush, Washington has been urging a reform of U.N. management of a variety of programs. But in this case, it opposed the rules drawn up to determine which nations could serve on the panel and cast a vote.
Wednesday's action follows a nearly year-long campaign by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to create a human rights organization to replace the Geneva-based Commission on Human Rights. Annan said the 60-year-old agency, which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, currently suffers from declining credibility and professionalism and has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.
Members of the current human rights panel include Zimbabwe, Sudan, Cuba, China and Saudi Arabia, all of which have long records of human rights violations. Rights abusers such as China have used their positions on the commission to block criticism of their human rights records.
Annan had proposed setting high membership standards, including a requirement that council members obtain votes from at least two-thirds of the U.N. membership to join. But he concluded that a compromise proposal, which required only an absolute majority of 96 votes for membership, was still worth supporting.
General Assembly President Jan Eliasson, who led negotiations on the council, said the resolution adopted Wednesday would strengthen the U.N. capacity to confront rights abusers and make it more difficult for them to join. The true test of the council's credibility will be the use that member states make of it, Annan said.
Bolton said Wednesday that Washington opposed the council for several reasons, but he highlighted the proponents' failure to secure the two-thirds vote requirement for membership. It would have helped to prevent the election of countries that only seek to undermine the new body from within, he said.
But other delegates and human rights advocates questioned the U.S. commitment to creating a strong human rights panel, saying that Bolton rarely participated in the months of negotiations aimed at forging a new council. When he did weigh in -- for instance, by asserting in December that the five veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council should have permanent seats on the rights panel -- he complicated the deliberations, according to diplomats and rights advocates.
In a thinly veiled attack on the United States, Peter Maurer, the Swiss ambassador, lashed out at those who want to make us believe that they are the only ones fighting for an ambitious human rights machinery, saying: All too often, too high-minded ambitions are coverups for less noble ambitions and are aimed not at improving the United Nations but at weakening it.
Senior U.N. officials and delegates said Bolton barely highlighted the importance of the two-thirds membership vote at a critical meeting this month with Eliasson, leading the General Assembly president to believe that the United States could accept the compromise. Eliasson declined to discuss the conversation.
I really feel that this is a matter I can't go into, but you're right that the emphasis was not so strongly on two-thirds, he said.
Bolton insisted that he forcefully raised the issue with Eliasson and said suggestions that the United States was not fully engaged in the negotiations are ridiculous.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other human rights groups praised the General Assembly's decision. But they cautioned that U.N. members will have to ensure that governments with poor rights records do not win election to the new council.