Second Time as Farce

March 17, 2006
The Wall Street Journal Europe

So the United Nations votes 170-4 to create a new Human Rights Council, and the U.S. -- one of four dissenters with Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands -- now promises to support the Council and pony up 22% of its operating expenses.

Back when the Bush Administration knew what it was doing, it chose to invest political capital in a quest for U.N. reform, pushing for Paul Volcker's Oil for Food probe and appointing bulldog diplomat John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador. Yet when Mr. Volcker's final report demonstrated pervasive corruption and incompetence at the highest levels, the Administration failed to demand Kofi Annan's resignation, apparently believing it wasn't worth the effort and that a politically beholden Secretary General could help advance U.S. aims.

Well, for months Mr. Bolton has been making the case that the proposed Human Rights Council failed to remedy the basic problems that had made its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, the most visible emblem of U.N. fecklessness and hypocrisy. Among its problems: no formal bar to miscreant countries and an unhappy ratio of dictatorships to democracies. This should have been the easiest reform for the U.N. to get right.

Instead, the Administration has borrowed from John Kerry's playbook, voting against the Council before voting for it. We have very high standards for human rights at the United Nations, Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns told the Washington Post by way of explaining the U.S. no vote. He then added that We also want to see the U.N. succeed, and so we hope the Human Rights Council can be strengthened over time so that they can deal effectively with real world problems such as Darfur and Burma.

Good luck with that, Mr. Burns. The Oil for Food scandal gave the U.N. a once-in-a-decade opportunity to adopt meaningful reforms, which is now being squandered. But instead of exacting a meaningful price for those failures, the U.S. is still agreeing to foot the bill for an outfit that actually gives the likes of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia a voice on human rights. So America is left with the political baggage of a costly diplomatic fight and a purely symbolic losing vote -- and a million-dollar U.S. taxpayer price tag for a morally bankrupt Council.