Academic criticises UN human rights record		

By Mark Colvin
11 July , 2008  
ABC 
Original Source: https://mail.hudsonny.org/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2301643.htm \t _blank http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2301643.htm

MARK COLVIN: Zimbabwe has written to the United Nations to protest against any possible sanctions against the country.

Zimbabwe warned the UN that any new sanctions would risk starting a civil war. The UN Security Council has delayed voting on a package of sanctions, while talks between the Mugabe Government and the Opposition continue in South Africa.

But there's still deep scepticism about whether the UN can and will do anything about Zimbabwe, and other human rights hot-spots.

Canadian Professor Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute is one of the most trenchant and persistent critics of the UN's human rights record.

She was in Australia this week and I asked her about her criticisms.

ANNE BAYEFSKY: Well the centrepiece of the UN human rights system is the Human Rights Council and what we're seeing is silence on countries like Zimbabwe or Darfur in Sudan. They have an inability to deal with the major issues of our time. 

Sudan there has been a few resolutions but genocide continues. They actually had the General Assembly gave rise to a report on Sudan which was unable to conclude that there was genocide was even going on there.

So Zimbabwe, Sudan, China, the major human rights issues of our time are being mishandled by the very organisation which we had such high expectations for. 

MARK COLVIN: Why did you have high expectations? What was the reform that you had expectations of?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The UN Human Rights Commission was the central human rights agency of the UN since it was founded. But over the years, it was widely discredited. Libya became a chair, the human rights abusers were on the inside instead of on the outside.

On the inside by that I mean dictating policy. And so Kofi Annan introduced the reform effort which replaced the commission with the Human Rights Council. It's been operating for two years now and it's been a profound embarrassment with the cure worse than the disease.

To give you a couple of examples of that: the Human Rights Commission spent much of its time demonising the state of Israel, 30 per cent of the resolutions ever adopted were about Israel and it did nothing on a country like China or Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia for example.

But the Human Rights Council has now passed 60 per cent of its resolutions on Israel alone and nothing on China and Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia.

MARK COLVIN: But is Israel actually the real centre of your argument?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: Israel's a diversionary tactic. If the human rights abusers who are on the council: Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China, Russia are dictating human rights policy. The best way of preventing criticism of one's own backyard is to divert attention. 

And that's how Israel is being used. Does it mean that Israel has no human rights problems? Obviously not, but it's not 60 per cent of the world's problems. When a billion people in China are ignored and the people of Zimbabwe are ignored altogether.

MARK COLVIN: You mentioned Kofi Annan saying that he would reform the organisation and Ban Ki-moon who succeeded him, one of his platforms when he was running was that he would continue and strengthen the reforms. Why does it keep going wrong in your view?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: It's a numbers game. The reality is that we just don't have the numbers to determine outcomes at the UN.

MARK COLVIN: But isn't that a council of despair, that it'll, it's unfixable? That the United Nations can never work?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The human rights abusers don't have a vested interest in making it function properly. The key is to develop alternatives that can do democratisation better. I mean why are we in the 21st century without a community of democracies that functions well.

MARK COLVIN: So you would like a break-away community of democracies, rather than a United Nations?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: I think there ought to be what other people have called a 'competitive multi-lateralism' - 'united democratic nations'. Doesn't mean the UN can disappear; it means that the UN can do some things well and other things it can't do. 

MARK COLVIN: But the European Union is a community of democracies and it seems scarcely more vigorous in its pursuit of human rights.

ANNE BAYEFSKY: That's the trouble. There isn't a more global entity that brings in Australia and Canada and the United States, together with the Europeans and democracies in Asia in Latin America and so on. And we need that.

MARK COLVIN: What I'm asking you is why that would be stronger than the European Union, apart from simply the number of countries in it. In fact, wouldn't the number of countries make it more likely that there would be dissent and that it too it would be crippled by vetoes like the UN? 

ANNE BAYEFSKY: Actually, the European Union has been quite successful. The Council of Europe I should say, in furthering democratisation within Eastern Europe as new democracies emerged by having conditions for membership. That's what we're missing on a global scale. The United Nations has no conditions for membership. 

So you have the minority of countries are fully, free democracies, and that's not a recipe for getting things right. And if we had a situation where we had conditions for membership in a more global united democratic nations as it's sometimes called, I think that that would be an incentive across the board.

What we are seeing now is that universal human rights are being undercut by the very organisation that was created to protect them.

It can't stop genocide in Sudan, it's can't stop the butchery that's going on in Zimbabwe or get Aung San Suu Kyi out of Myanmar. And civilisation is threatened, we can't be sanguine about it, we can't sit around waiting and hoping that one day the UN will get it right.

MARK COLVIN: Professor Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute.