Zimbabwe to chair UN commission
By Mark Turner
May 2, 2007
The Financial Times
Original Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/08a0fa7c-f8d2-11db-a940-000b5df10621.html

Zimbabwe is poised to become chair of the United Nation’s Commission on Sustainable Development, while Belarus is set to win a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, in two decisions likely to attract fresh criticism of the world body.
A UN diplomat on Wednesday said that Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, looked almost certain to get the CSD position after being nominated as Africa’s candidate in April. 
Zimbabwe government policies are seen as having triggered its most severe economic crisis since independence, with annual inflation at 2,200 per cent. 
Qatar holds the chair of the session due to end next week. By tradition the position rotates regionally, with Africa next in line. 
The Commission, created in 1993, is the UN’s main forum for discussing the relationship between development and the environment and is expected to issue recommendations on climate change next week.
Meanwhile, a coalition of 40 human rights groups called on the UN to reject Belarus’s candidacy for the Human Rights Council, which last year replaced the discredited Human Rights Commission but has itself faced mounting criticism.
“Belarus’s record on human rights makes [it] a supremely unfit candidate for the
	 .	 .	 .	 Council,  said Human Rights Watch, a New York based pressure group, in a statement issued on behalf of three dozen rights groups. The Belarusan government  severely restricts the activities of human rights groups, and has systematically moved to clo
se them and opposition parties. Peaceful protesters are violently dispersed and arrested, and opposition leaders are jailed,” it said. 
The 47-nation Human Rights Council was conceived as a way to refocus the UN’s primary rights body away from political point-scoring, where abusive governments banded together to avert criticism. 
But it has failed to conduct peer reviews on its own members’ human rights records and in elections this month mos
t candidates are running unopposed. Only Belarus and Slovenia are contesting two vacant seats for eastern Europe. Slovenia had indicated it would not stand if opposed.