UN rights body: It's still a mess

June 26, 2006
The National Post (Canada)
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/editorialsletters/story.html?id=df624a22-2bf9-4a1c-9d46-f6ad93ecb344&p=1


It certainly didn't take long for the United Nations' new human rights council to prove itself every bit as facile and irrelevant as the old rights commission it replaced. A month ago, when more than a third of the 47 member-states elected to the council turned out to be rights-abusing nations, we guessed that ultimately nothing much would be achieved by dismantling the old body in favour of the new. But not even we were cynical enough to predict that less than a week into its inaugural session in Geneva, the new watchdog would betray itself as just as obsessed with U.S.-bashing and as blind to abuses by the world's dictators as the old commission.
As part of its delegation, Iran has sent Saeed Mortazavi, a government prosecutor widely thought to have sanctioned the torture and possibly even the execution of political prisoners. He is believed to have overseen the custody and interrogation of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi of Montreal, who died while in prison in Iran, apparently of wounds suffered at the hands of her jailers.
The former commission had become so widely discredited -- even by the UN's shockingly indulgent standards --that Secretary-General Kofi Annan felt compelled to disband it last year. Syria, one of the world's most abusive regimes, had been elected to the commission's presidency. A 2001 conference organized by the commission in Durban, South Africa, deteriorated into one of the worst examples of organized anti-Semitism since the Nuremberg rallies. And an old boys' network of abusive governments had stacked the commission's governing body so they could block any attempt to investigate their rights records.
Unfortunately, little has changed. Despite changes to the way countries may be elected to the council, 17 of the 47 member states are rated as significant or extreme abusers. That makes it hard to believe the council will be any more successful at punishing its own. Election to the council, then, will quickly be seen as an indemnity against being held to account for repression used to defend authoritarian regimes.
Rhetorically, there is little difference too. This week, delegate after delegate has risen to denounce the United States as the source of all evil in the world, and its worst rights abuser. Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba's Foreign Minister, declared his country's election to the council as a victory of principles and truth. Whereas the absence of the United States is the defeat of lies (...) the moral punishment for the haughtiness of an empire. Cuba's election, Mr. Roque insisted, was a proclamation by the world of the prevalence of lawfulness over force, defending the United Nations charter, demanding and fighting for a better world.
Actually, the Americans voted against the council's creation and did not seek a seat on its governing body precisely because the White House was certain the council will turn out just as it has; in other words, a mess.
Even Louise Arbour, the former Canadian Supreme Court justice who is the permanent head of the council, saw cause only to single out the U.S. for criticism while ignoring abuses in China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Algeria and a host of other nations. Arbour lambasted Washington for allegedly running secret detention centres beyond Guantanamo and condoning torture of suspects in the war on terror, while neglecting to mention that neither allegation has been proven. Nor did she similarly condemn terrorists.
It is hard to see what has been accomplished by the dismantling of the old UN commission and its replacement by the new council. Like its predecessor, it seems destined to become a club of Third World abusers and sophomoric First World U.S.-haters.