China, the U.N. and Human Rights

May 8, 2006
The Wall Street Journal
Original Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114703718003846064.html

It's a stretch to call the U.N.'s former Human Rights Commission aggressive. Over the years, that discredited body rarely missed a chance to turn a blind eye to the world's most egregious human-rights violations. That's because its members -- think Cuba, Zimbabwe and Sudan -- were the ones committing them.
Well, it turns out even that spineless group was too confrontational for Beijing's taste. That's right: The Party squirmed when the U.S. tabled resolutions highlighting China's human-rights abuses, even if they were doomed to defeat. So now that the U.N. is putting together a successor body, the Human Rights Council, Beijing is campaigning for a seat. Its platform? Ensuring that the new body doesn't make the same mistake of allowing the chronic disease of country-specific resolutions.
If you thought that would harm China's chances of winning a seat in tomorrow's vote by members of the General Assembly, you're not living in U.N.-land. Never mind that Beijing continues to jail dissidents who peacefully express themselves on the Internet, deports starving North Korean refugees to face execution in their homeland, and prevents China's Catholics from openly declaring their allegiance to the Pope.
Thanks to Kofi Annan's agreement to rig the composition of the 54-member council in favor of the world's least democratic regions, China (which has been a member of the old commission since 1982) can pretty much count on one of the 13 seats on the new body reserved for Asian and Middle Eastern nations. With Iran and Saudi Arabia also in the running, Beijing is in good company for arguing there's no need to worry about minor details such as its lack of democracy. No wonder the U.S., which would have had to compete for one of the mere seven seats reserved for the Western democracies (compared with a further 13 allocated to Africa), decided against dignifying this lop-sided contest with its participation.
We're not surprised that such equitable geographical distribution, as Beijing and Mr. Annan like to call it, looks set to produce a new body every bit as bad as its predecessor. What's more surprising is that if China gets its way in censoring the council's discussion of abuses committed by individual countries, this will count as yet another U.N. reform that has only made matters worse.