Flawed record on rights


Craig Offman
September 7, 2007
National Post
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=b07c590e-0dbb-4a3b-ab2d-c71461c93649&k=0

Victims of ethnic persecution, oppressed women and political dissidents throughout the world might have even more reason to despair. Unless they live in Israel, the United Nations' Human Rights Council will not be taking aim at their suffering any time soon. 
During the five regular sessions the group of 47 nations has held since its inception a year-and-a-half ago, the overwhelming majority of its non-procedural decisions set the Holy Land in its crosshairs. Three of four special sessions concerned the country's purported misbehaviour in the Middle East. (The other one concerned the crisis in Darfur, but it fell short of condemning the regime in Sudan, which has institutionalized a genocide.)
At the end of August, delegates met to create a blueprint for an anti-racism conference in 2009, much along the lines of the ill-fated 2001 Durban conference organized by the organization's much-scorned forebear, the Human Rights Council. 
Libya, which after eight years freed five Bulgarian nurses held on trumped-up charges of infecting children with HIV, chairs the preparatory committee for Durban II. Socialist Cuba is a co-chair of Durban II, as is theocratic Iran, which does not sit on the council itself but nonetheless wrestled a co-chair's seat.
On Monday, the council will reconvene in Geneva for 18 days, but only half a day will be devoted to the Darfur crisis. 
Overhauled last year as a result of its despotically inclined membership, wrong-headed focus and disproportionate interest in all things Israel, a new and improved panel was supposed to soften some of these rough edges. But critics think it's already looking an awful lot like its predecessor, and its plans for a Durban sequel puts an exclamation point on their concern. 
The question is, what will Canada do about it? asked Anne Bayefsky, a Canadian who is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, a prominent New York think-tank. 
Also a leading human-rights advocate and lawyer, Dr. Bayefsky edits the Web site eyeontheun.com, which monitors the world body. 
Canada should register disgust that Durban is a vehicle for the enemies of human rights and democracy and should refuse to participate. 
It hands a platform to the worst kinds of extremists.
Citing its inability to prevent despots from signing up, the United States opted out in 2006. Canada, however, is a member until 2009.
Led by Mr. Doru Costea of Romania, the council's revolving membership is under the umbrella of  the High Commissioner of Human Rights, who in this case is Louise Arbour, a former Canadian supreme court justice and a world-renowned human-rights advocate.
Canada has not committed to the upcoming conference, whose venue has not been decided yet. We're still evaluating results of the meetings to see if they will replicate deficiencies of the 2001 conference, foreign affairs spokeswoman Catherine Gagnaire said.  
Held in South Africa days before the 9/11 attacks, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance set out to address topics such as the enslavement of women and children, but Canada and other nations felt it expended too much energy and vitriol on Israel at the expense of other issues. The U.S. and Israel walked out the meetings.
We believe, and we have said in the clearest possible terms, that it was inappropriate - wrong - to address the Palestinian-Israel conflict in this forum, Canadian delegate Paul Heinbecker said at the time.
The Federal Liberals spent more than $2-million on the controversial summit, which cost the world body more than $10-million and was widely seen as a public-relations disaster.
By the time the United Nations meeting stumbled to its confused close on Saturday - a full day behind schedule - the all-important interpreters were threatening to walk off the job, dancers for a closing cultural show had long gone home, and auditorium seats for more than 80 nations sat empty, the National Post reported at the time. 
By the time of its demise five years later, the Human Rights Committee was widely considered an overgrown fig-leaf for human rights abusers, behind which countries such as Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe could in essence behave badly and protect each other from international condemnation. 
In an effort to make over the panel, the committee was rechristened a council, and the UN developed a new set of rules  they hoped would change the composition of its grim, despotic membership.
According to the council's Web site, its mandate was preventing human rights violations, securing respect for all human rights, promoting international cooperation to protect human rights, coordinating related activities throughout the United Nations, and strengthening and streamlining the United Nations system in the field of human rights.
Any UN nation can announce its candidacy, but it would have to be elected by an absolute majority of the 191 UN members. To ensure equal representation across the map, Africa and Asia would have 13 seats each; Latin America and the Caribbean together would have eight; Western nations, seven; and Eastern Europe, six. Countries would serve a maximum of two three-year terms and would have to leave the council before running for election again.
The United States, Israel, the Marshall Islands and the tiny Micronesian island of Palau voted against the council's creation, saying the new rules were not tough enough to prevent abusers from becoming members. 
But Canada, which the UN has previously criticized for its human-rights record against its Natives and homeless populations, ran for a seat and made the cut, joining countries such as Pakistan and Russia. Venezuela and Iran, which abstained from voting on the council's creation, were rejected. 
Unlike its northern neighbour, the United States did not offer itself up for a vote, which some critics saw as retrenchment. The idea that we'd be better off without the council is misdirected, said Human Rights Watch's Steve Crawshaw, the group's UN advocacy director who is based in New York. It basically hands it over to people who don't want human rights to succeed.
While critical of its over-emphasis on Israel, Mr. Crawshaw offers some cautious hope for the council: The nomination of Belarus, a noted state of tyranny, was recently rejected. Beginning this year, the council will also scrutinize for the first time the human rights situations in all UN member states through a peer-pressure program called Universal Periodic Review. 
The so-called UPR provides an unprecedented opportunity for public scrutiny of states' records, which could put peer pressure on governments to take concrete steps on human rights abuses. 
At the same time, UN watchers claim the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) represents a nearly insurmountable voting bloc on the council, its influence spanning across the council's continental divides. Some of the OIC's membership have included Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan and Azerbaijan. They're basically controlling it, says Dr. Bayefsky, and the EU [European Union] countries have capitulated.
Eyeontheun.com kept score on the debates between the Muslim bloc and the European countries during the four-day Durban preparatory committee that ended Aug. 31. 
The EU conceded last point over the budget.
How much is all this going to cost the Western governments who feel the need to feed the hand that bites them? wondered the site.  
The European Union, who huffed and puffed that they would withhold funds if they didn't get what they wanted on all the other issues, agreed that the UN regular budget should 'provide the necessary resources for the preparations for the Durban Review Conference.' 
By the end of session, the Web site reported that the EU was trounced 6-0.