Outrage as Usual

By Collin Levey
February 10, 2005
The New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/21760.htm

February 10, 2005 -- THE new leadership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission calls to mind an old story: Told that the World Bank would be holding a conference on corruption in his country, a Cambodian official joked: Why — to learn how to do it better? 
Recently elected to this year's Human Rights Commission action panel were Cuba and Zimbabwe. So the regimes of two of the world's top rights abusers — Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro — will now help decide which human-rights complaints will get a U.N. hearing. Castro's most recent roundup of political dissidents merely restocked his island's now-famous prisons. Mugabe's abuses are producing a famine in his once-food-exporting nation — and now he's effectively banned foreign human-rights workers from his country, by banning foreign funding of their work. 
OK, it's déjà vu all over again. Libya was president of the Human Rights Commission a few years back, and Sudan is now in its third straight membership term, even as the United Nations debates whether what's going on in Sudan's Darfur province rises to the level of genocide or merely garden-variety state-sponsored mass murder. 
Secretary-General Kofi Annan's own team of experts concluded in a report last year that governments covet slots on the commission mainly as a way to shield their own derrieres — i.e., Not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others. 
No kidding. The world's most flagrant rights abusers typically vote as a bloc in favor of letting each other off the hook. In the most recent sessions, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Sudan, China, Egypt and Nigeria joined together reliably to exonerate whichever government was being accused. 
But lately there may be an added motive, even for countries with decent human-rights records: Sticking a finger in America's eye. 
Members are nominated by their neighbors in regional blocs. Cuba was Latin America's choice, Zimbabwe was Africa's and so on. But Cuba is virtually without significance in the world except as an icon of anti-Americanism. Defiance of the gringos is all Castro has left to peddle anymore. And his neighbors seem happy to buy — subsidizing him to give voice to anti-yanqui sentiments that would be undiplomatic coming from their own mouths. 
Contributing to such cynical choices is the fact everyone long ago gave up hope that the Human Rights Commission might play a serious role. 
How to turn this around? That U.N. report suggested expanding the commission to include everybody — all 191 U.N. members. This gets it exactly backward: The commission doesn't need more cacophony, but more clarity. 
Not all countries have a right to sit in judgment of their neighbors. Human Rights Watch has argued that, at the very least, members of the commission should be required to have signed human-rights treaties, and have demonstrated some basic level of respect for the principle. 
Freedom House, which scores countries according to political freedoms, last year noted that 13 members — a quarter of the commission — ranked as either repressive or not free, representing the very bottom of the barrel worldwide. Reporters Without Borders has duly observed that nearly half — 25 — haven't even ratified the human-rights treaties they're supposedly charged with enforcing. 
Why not follow the model of the World Trade Organization, where you don't get invited to join until you meet some minimum standards of openness to world trade and investment? 
A simple fact of numbers at the United Nations is that the brutal and uncivilized countries of the world have the power to dominate discussions and prevent reform. That's because at the moment, U.N. membership bestows the same legitimacy on countries that live up to mankind's greatest ideals and those who make manifest the darkest horrors of human nature. 
The United Nations has been looking for ideas for reform, so here's one: Scrap this horror of a Human Rights Commission and start a new group that's willing to acknowledge that not all counties are created equal — that's a right reserved to men.