Grim Outlook for Makeup of New UN Rights Council

By Patrick Goodenough
May 4, 2006
CNSNews.com 
Original Source: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200605/FOR20060504b.html


(CNSNews.com) - Almost half of the members of the United Nation's new Human Rights Council will be countries with poor records in holding free elections and respecting civil liberties.

Hopes that the new body will be a significant improvement on the one it replaces will be put to the test on Tuesday when the HRC's 47 members are elected.

Despite built-in mechanisms meant to ensure the best membership possible, among them will be some of the regimes that brought the HRC's predecessor, the outgoing U.N. Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), into disrepute.

In particular, human rights campaigners worry that they could include China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Russia, all of which are in the running.

Of the 68 U.N. member states that have put forward their candidacies for the 47 HRC seats, only 32 (47 percent) are free, according to the U.S.-based independent democracy watchdog, Freedom House. Of the remainder, 24 are partly free and 12 not free.

Freedom House carries out annual assessments of countries' political rights and civil liberties. Twenty-five issues are examined and scores tallied, with states then designated free, partly free or not free.

The U.N. resolution that set up the HRC asks member states, when voting, to take into consideration candidate countries' contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights.

The aim is to make it less likely that rights-violating countries can get onboard.

Even so, once geographical representation is taken into account, the highest possible number of free countries that will make it onto the Geneva-based HRC from the current batch of candidates is 27.

Even under the best possible scenario, therefore, 43 percent of the council's initial membership will comprise countries that score poorly on the Freedom House rankings.

In Africa, only five out of 16 candidates running for 13 seats earmarked for that region are designated free by Freedom House. Even if all five -- Ghana, Mali, Mauritius, Senegal and South Africa -- are successful, 62 percent of the African members of the council will be countries where political rights and civil liberties are curtailed.

Similarly, in Asia, only four of the 18 contenders for 13 seats are considered free -- India, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. If all four are elected, 69 percent of the Asian group will be made up of countries whose rights records are frequently criticized.

In Eastern Europe, human rights campaigners say the situation looks more positive, as eight of 13 candidates for the region's six seats are free. At the same time, one of the others, unfree Russia, is almost certain to be elected. A permanent member of the Security Council, Russia held a seat on the UNCHR every year since its inception in 1947 until its shutdown this year.

Latin America's 12 candidates, competing for eight slots, include six free countries. The others include Cuba, which despite its often criticized human rights record was a member of the UNCHR continuously from 1976 to 1984 and again from 1989 to 2006.

The final group, Western Europe and Others, has nine countries - Canada and eight European nations -- contending for seven seats, and all nine are rated free by Freedom House. The U.S., one of just four countries to vote against the resolution creating the HRC, decided not to stand in the inaugural election.

'New standards more important than old loyalties'

The council's initial membership will be elected by the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.

Candidates will need 96 votes, or an absolute majority of the total membership of 191 states, to be successful. The U.S. government earlier argued for a two-thirds threshold, or 128 countries, but the General Assembly demurred.

U.N. Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental organization (NGO), was this week able to endorse only 40 of the 68 candidates -- and in 11 cases only on condition the countries concerned committed themselves to a positive voting approach in the future.

U.N. Watch said these were countries that, while generally designated free, had a negative or mixed record when it came to past votes on U.N. human rights issues.

For example, India and South Africa, despite having committed themselves to promote democratic values at the U.N., both voted last year against a move to consider the human rights situation in Darfur, Sudan, choosing instead to go along with the mostly non-democratic Africa group.

These countries tend to base their U.N. votes on regional or developing world loyalty rather than on their democratic values, and as a result too often ally with non-democracies to protect egregious rights violators, the NGO said.

The new standards for [HRC] membership require members to put the promotion and protection of human rights before U.N. politics.

U.N. Watch also said it could not endorse any of the candidate countries designated not free by Freedom House.

In some cases, it said, such candidates had poisoned the UNCHR and posed a real threat to its replacement.

If egregious and systematic human rights violators like China, Cuba, Iran, Russia or Saudi Arabia win election to the council, it will be an ominous sign that the council is - as some of us had worried - nothing more than the commission by another name, said U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer.

Urging democracies to band together during next week's election, he called on member states to reject countries that abuse human rights and that would use their seats to continue voting at the U.N. against resolutions for victims in Darfur or elsewhere.

Otherwise, the council is doomed to repeat the glaring hypocrisies of its predecessor ... and meet the same humiliating fate.

Periodic reviews

Human Rights Watch was one of a number of NGOs that supported the resolution creating the HRC despite having concerns about some aspects.

Lawrence C. Moss, an international lawyer and special counsel for U.N. reform at the New York-based rights group, wrote recently that the new system of voting was very different from the old one.

With the UNCHR, the U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) usually selected the 53 members by merely rubber-stamping closed regional slates, slates that had been proposed by the five regional groups within the U.N. and that included only as many countries as there were seats.

This time, individual candidates have to obtain sufficient support -- 96 votes -- to be successful.

A regional group cannot therefore alone dictate the choice of members from its region, Moss said in an article written for an American University Washington College of Law publication.

This gives supporters of human rights a much greater opportunity to build a coalition of states that will decline to support the election of inappropriate candidates.

He also noted that for the first time all member states will have their own rights record reviewed periodically, and states that commit gross rights violations during their term of membership can be suspended.

Critics have pointed out, however, that suspension requires a two-thirds majority vote, making it more difficult to be ejected from the council than winning a seat in the first place.