Pillay Will Have Her Work Cut Out for Her in Geneva

By Benny Avni
July 21, 2008
The New York Sun
Original Source: http://www.nysun.com/foreign/pillay-will-have-her-work-cut-out-for-her/82221/

Here is an undeniable fact the South African jurist Navanethem Pillay will face if Secretary-General Ban names her today or tomorrow to the highest post in Geneva's international scene: The human rights system she presumably will lead is a real mess.
Even worse: No one — even a Durban-born feminist of Tamil origin with strong apartheid-fighting credentials — is likely to fix it. Such attributes, which on their face should highly qualify anyone for human rights leadership, could become a hindrance in Geneva, where the system fits Orwell's worst nightmares about abuse of language, politics, and international relations.
The United Nations belatedly realized in 2007 that its human rights mechanism is broken. But when it replaced it with a supposedly new and improved Human Rights Council, the system's worst qualities became even worse. So can a new leader turn things around?
It is not yet clear how quickly Mr. Ban will announce the appointment but most Turtle Bay denizens now assume that press reports over the weekend (and a prediction in this space a week ago) are correct, and Ms. Pillay, a Hague-based International Criminal Court appeals judge, will soon move to Geneva to become the next human rights commissioner.
Last-minute maneuvers by nongovernmental organizations and some late muscle-flexing by American diplomats may have slowed down the announcement, but the abundance of press reports, and Mr. Ban's communication with key players in the human rights field, indicate that the choice is close to final. If so, it's not clear whether congratulations are due to Ms. Pillay or condolences.
The South African jurist's best-known attribute so far is an unyielding promotion of reproductive rights. This is likely to pit her against religious-oriented human rights promoters who are pro-life. She will need them as allies on other fights. She will soon learn, however, that no-win abortion battles are the least of her problems.
Human Rights Watch's Kenneth Roth told the Associated Press last week that he hoped Ms. Pillay would publicly criticize powerful countries, be they America on its abusive counterterrorism policies, or her own South Africa for its callous defense of Mugabe's repression in Zimbabwe.
Currently, Geneva almost never speaks out forcefully against Zimbabwe, Burma, Cuba, China, Russia, most Arab countries, or other places where human rights are violated with little publicity. The system is dominated by countries that possess no internal mechanisms to promote human rights inside their own borders. Naturally, most rebuke is reserved for America, and even more so for Israel, which do.
Violations of human rights certainly do exist in America and Israel, but here and there a free press, an independent judiciary, and an unfettered array of advocacy groups constantly harp on abuses both real and imagined. While imperfect, such self-correcting institutions are the finest watchdogs in existence. U.N. human rights organs add very little to their work.
The next human rights commissioner, whose main role is that of a tone-setter, needs to resist Mr. Roth's simplistic equation between America and Zimbabwe. Acts against alleged terrorists at Guantanamo are rarely as horrifying as Mr. Mugabe's brutality against people who have merely committed politics. But even if they were, they would only be comparable once a homegrown Zimbabwean version of Human Rights Watch is allowed to operate in Harare.
Yes, Ms. Pillay needs to speak out against Mr. Mugabe's defenders in her native South Africa. But even more importantly, she needs to alert the international human rights system to its most blatant abuse, symbolized by the namesake of her city of birth.
The tone that underlined a 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban is likely to be present again at a so-called Durban II follow-up, planned for early next year in Geneva. Unless Ms. Pillay unequivocally speaks out against the anti-Semitism on display at these anti-discrimination conferences, Geneva is unlikely to reverse this blow to its credibility.
An over-the-top obsession with Israel in human rights circles is driven by some of the darkest regimes on earth. Since its victory over apartheid, Pretoria increasingly allies itself with such regimes even as South Africa's democracy is alive and well. Ms. Pillay is not part of President Mbeki's government but, as UN Watch's Hillel Neuer sadly notes, Being in the anti-Apartheid movement is not a guarantee that one would be in the forefront of the fight for human rights.
Let's hope Ms. Pillay's presumed appointment does not guarantee business as usual in Geneva.