Source: http://www.usunnewyork.usmission.gov/press_releases/20071116_313.html http://www.usunnewyork.usmission.gov/press_releases/20071116_313.html Date: November 16, 2007 USUN PRESS RELEASE # 313(07) November 16, 2007 AS DELIVERED Office of Press and Public Diplomacy United States Mission to the United Nations 140 East 45th Street New York, N.Y. 10017 Explanation of Vote by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Permanent Representative, on the Human Rights Council Institutions Building Package, in the Third Committee of the General Assembly, November 16, 2007 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Chairman, the United States is compelled to vote “No” on the institution building package considered by the Committee today. We cast this vote sadly, because we still believe, as we have always believed, that the protection and promotion of human rights are an important part of the United Nations’ reason for being. For at least 60 years --- at least since 1948 when the General Assembly unanimously adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights --- the United Nations has been committed, in the words of the Declaration, to the “recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” And the UN has recognized for all those years, again in the words of the declaration, that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Mr. Chairman, it was our shared commitment to these principles that inspired Member States to form the Human Rights Council. The Council was intended to be different from and better than its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, where political alliances had seemed too often to get in the way of telling the simple truth about human rights violations. Unfortunately, the Council was created with deep structural flaws -- particularly the General Assembly’s decision not to adopt a provision that would have excluded the world’s most serious human rights violators from membership on the Council. Despite our concerns about institutional weaknesses, the United States engaged actively in trying to strengthen the Council during its first year. We had hoped that the “institution building” session would address the deficiencies that had politicized the Council and prevented it from acting as a serious and effective human rights institution. But the Council’s record so far failed to fulfill our hopes. The surprise announcement in Geneva on June 19 that the package now before us had been adopted the night before --- although the only thing that had really happened the night before was an announcement that the Council would not act on the package until the next day --- was a fitting end to a very bad first year for the Council. Mr. Chairman, please allow me to itemize some of the things that went wrong during this first year: First, there was the Council’s relentless focus during the year on a single country – Israel. At the same time, the Council failed during the year to address serious human rights violations taking place in other countries such as Zimbabwe, DPRK, Iran, Belarus, and Cuba. Key provisions of the institution building package before us today appear likely to compound the Council’s institutional weaknesses. It is particularly disappointing that the package prematurely terminates the mandates of the UN Special Rapporteurs charged with monitoring and reporting on two of the world’s most active perpetrators of serious human rights violations, the Governments of Cuba and Belarus. Another disturbing feature of the institution building package is that the Permanent Agenda of the Council contains one and only one item having to do with a specific country. Once again, that country is Israel. This raises serious questions about the Human Rights Council’s institutional priorities, its ability to make unbiased assessments of human rights situations, and whether it will take seriously its responsibility to protect and promote human rights around the world with particular attention to the most serious violations of human rights. Finally, Mr. Chairman, deeply unfair and un-transparent procedures were employed to deny Council members the opportunity to vote on the package we are now considering. If a tactic like this had been used in a national election in any country in the world --- announcing that the election would be held on a certain day, and then telling voters who showed up on the appointed day that the election had actually been held at midnight the night before --- the world would rightly regard that election as unfree and unfair. The proceedings of all United Nations bodies should be models of fairness and transparency. This is particularly true of the Human Rights Council, which was intended to be the world’s leading human rights protection mechanism. The procedure by which this package was adopted calls into serious question whether it can ever realize that goal. Mr. Chairman, we sincerely hope to be proved wrong in our assessment. In particular, we would be deeply gratified if the Human Rights Council took several important steps during the next year: First, we hope that the process of Universal Periodic Review will subject the world’s worst human rights violators to real scrutiny and perhaps even persuade them to mend their ways. Universal Periodic Review will be a genuine human rights protection mechanism if it is conducted with seriousness and rigor --- with an honest unbiased focus on the facts on the ground in each country, with voting on the merits rather than by blocs or alliances, and unhindered by comfortable assertions of cultural relativism and moral equivalency. We hope also that the Human Rights Council will be ready to respond to genuine human rights emergencies --- as it did admirably with respect to Burma this September but had failed to do during the crisis in Zimbabwe earlier this year. Finally, we hope the Council will pass strong and accurate resolutions about country-specific human rights situations, as it has also done on Burma --- and we congratulate the Council for this --- but has not yet done with regard to other compelling situations around the world. The Council will be the world’s most important human rights mechanism if and only if it consistently focuses on the worst human rights violations in the world --- including extrajudicial killing and the use of rape for military and political purposes and imprisonment of people for their political or religious opinions --- and calls these acts, which the Universal Declaration called “these barbarous acts which have shocked the conscience of mankind,” by their right names. In short, Mr. Chairman, we hope that the Human Rights Council will stand in solidarity with victims of human rights violations around the world, not with the perpetrators.