UN takes a small step in the right direction

March 19, 2006
The Montreal Gazette 
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/editorial/story.html?id=247da028-5f32-4277-8478-532c40379b1f


The United Nations has taken a much-needed step toward credibility on human rights by abolishing the disgrace known as the UN Commission on Human Rights.
That body is rotten with hypocrisy and infested with dictatorships, including the human rights hells of Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe. It has finally collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, which Secretary-General Kofi Annan summoned the courage to call declining credibility and professionalism.
The new Human Rights Council will, the people of the world hope, be better. But it's not easy to be optimistic.
The UN General Assembly voted 170-4 in favour of the change. Canada was in favour. The U.S. was against, because of concerns that the new body, like the old one, will be systematically biased against the U.S. and against Israel. But U.S. Ambassador John Bolton, who has taken a hard line against many UN flaws and abuses, surprised observers by signalling his government will help fund the council, hoping to make it as strong and effective as it can be.
That's a goal every government says it supports. But it was telling that the UN lacked the political will to set a high threshold for national membership on the new body. The U.S. and others had called for a system by which no country could have a vote on the Human Rights Council without having won two-thirds support in the General Assembly.
But there wasn't enough backing in the General Assembly for that high standard; the threshold will instead be 50 per cent, making it easier for morally bankrupt regimes to gain membership.
The 47 members of the new Council will be chosen in May. That will provide the first test of how serious the United Nations really is about making a new start.
The real problem here is that too few of the world body's 191 member governments are serious about what the developed world thinks of as human rights.
That's why the old Commission on Human Rights was able to cast what Annan admitted was a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole. While perhaps implicitly too optimistic about the reputation of the UN system as a whole, this assessment was absolutely correct about the commission.
Certainly nobody can say that the United States, or Canada, or any country has a spotless human rights record. Some recent developments in the United States have raised grave concerns among many in that country about the way national security impinges on genuine rights. Nor has Canada been immune to this ailment. Just ask Maher Arar.
But it remains true all the same that established democracies do better than dictatorships in matters of human rights. Letting dictatorships, oligarchies and other countries lacking free institutions serve as the arbiters of human rights around the world is a recipe for irrelevance, if not mischief or worse.
Bolton was right to say the real test of this new Human Rights Council will be the quality of membership that emerges ... and whether it takes effective action to address serious human rights abuse cases like Sudan, Cuba, Iran, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Burma.