Human Rights Commission Includes Six of the World's Worst Violators
BY BENNY AVNI - Special to the Sun
April 1, 2005

UNITED NATIONS - Six of the world's worst violators of human rights are members of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, according to one of the most reliable lists released annually to shame abusive regimes.
The list, released yesterday in Geneva by the Freedom House organization, includes China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe as among the 18 worst regimes in the world. As Freedom House notes in its release, the group of six countries represents nearly 11% of the 53-member Geneva-based U.N. Commission on Human Rights, charged with ensuring human rights standards around the world.
Rather than serving as the proper international forum for identifying and publicly censuring the world's most egregious human rights violators, Freedom House's executive director, Jennifer Windsor, said that the U.N. protects abusers, enabling them to sit in judgment of democratic states that honor and respect the rule of law.
Human rights violators have often rushed to be elected to the commission, where they are accepted based on their strength within regional groups - rather than their human rights records. The process of gaining a position on the Commission on Human Rights has been denounced by critics of the United Nations. One prominent report was prepared by a panel chosen by Secretary-General Annan to suggest U.N. reform. That group noted that the commission has become a U.N embarrassment.
In a package of reform ideas Mr. Annan presented earlier this month to the General Assembly, he suggested a smaller Human Rights Council, akin to the Security Council, in which membership would require vote by two thirds of the 192-member General Assembly. That is what the Secretary-General's idea is all about, setting criteria for a human rights body, a U.N. spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told The New York Sun yesterday.
On the same day Mr. Annan presented his reform in New York, the halls of the commission in Geneva were full of activity as the commission carried a day of denunciations of abuse of Palestinian Arabs by Israel.
And as reform ideas abound, much of the diplomacy practiced at the U.N. is based on a premise not of naming, shaming, and punishing violators of international human rights norms, but on trying to reason with abusers. If you just consider them pariahs and don't deal with them, they don't cooperate with you. That's the theory, Algeria's U.N. ambassador, Abdallah Baali, said.
Countries on the Freedom House human rights violations list quickly tried to shift the blame to others. When told by the Sun that his country is mentioned as one of the worst on the list, the Sudan's Ambassador Elfatih Erwa quickly shot back, Who are the other ones? Are the Guantanamo Bay jail keepers on the list or are they not?