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The UN’s new-look Human Rights Council - don’t hold your breath

By Patrick Goodenough - posted Friday, 24 March 2006


As the dust clears after last week’s UN vote creating a Human Rights Council, attention will swing quickly to the likely make-up of the new body, whose predecessor was disgraced by the presence and disruptive antics of serial rights violators.

The US stood virtually alone against the resolution creating the new council, not because it wanted to retain the discredited commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) - it was, indeed, one of its severest critics - but because it said the replacement failed to fix the problems.

In the end, the US and just three allies, Israel and two small Pacific island nations, voted against the resolution and the council was duly born.

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Critics of the Bush administration greeted the vote count as evidence of America’s deepening isolation, and on the ineffectiveness of the diplomacy practiced by John Bolton, US Ambassador to the UN.

Just wait, though, for May 9. That’s the day the General Assembly is due to elect the members of the new council to sit in Geneva.

There will be 47 of them, just six fewer than the number of seats in the UNCHR, whose ranks in recent years included such unsavoury regimes as Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Bolton had pressed for a much smaller body - around 20 initially, although he said earlier in the negotiations that the US was willing, as a compromise, to accept up to 30.

But, as was the case on so many other points, the US saw that proposal relegated to the garbage bin during the months of wheeling and dealing, co-ordinated by two UN “facilitators” under the oversight of General Assembly president Jan Eliasson.

So the UN’s 191 member states will vote for roughly one-quarter of their number to take seats on the council.

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In order for an individual nation to get the nod, it will require the support of 96 of those 191 members. (Bolton wanted a two-thirds threshold, or 128 countries, but there again the US position was thrown out.)

And the resolution also says that if a council member fails to uphold high human rights standards, it can be suspended by a two-thirds majority vote, or 128 members. (Bolton wanted a one-third vote, or 64 members, but - well, you get the picture.)

Turning matters on their heads, the UN therefore made it easier for a rights violator to get onto the council, and harder for it to be kicked off.

Oddly enough, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International still felt the US should go for it

They’re not the only human rights watchdogs on the block, however. The independent Freedom House has for decades been gauging countries’ behaviour, ranking them as “free”, “partly free” or “not free”.

The global picture has improved significantly over the past 30 years. In 1975, Freedom House ranked 25 per cent of the world’s nations as free. By 2005 the number had reached 46 per cent.

That’s still a long way off the world hoped for by millions around the world, and certainly by the founders of Freedom House. (They included Eleanor Roosevelt, who incidentally chaired the committee that drafted the declaration the UNCHR has been supposed to live by.)

Of the 191 countries that will be voting for the Human Rights Council’s members, 88 are judged free under the Freedom House criteria. Another 58 are partly free, while 45 are not free.

Mugabe, Castro et al

This week’s resolution calls on UN member states to take into account candidates’ contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights when voting.

It also requires “equitable geographic distribution” of members. Whatever other “reforms” they may have been willing to consider, many countries were simply not prepared to abandon their obsession with regional groupings.

At the new council, Africa will get 13 seats, Asia 13, Eastern Europe 6, Latin American and the Caribbean 8, and the Western European and others 7. (The latter group includes democracies like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.)

So Africa and Asia will together account for more than 55 per cent of the council’s members, while Western nations’ representation stands at below 15 percent.

And going back to the Freedom House rankings, it’s not hard to see what that means.

It’s not clear yet whether regional groups will be required to put forward more candidates than there are seats allocated to their particular region - and so ensure that member states actually have a pool to vote from. But don’t count on it.

Even if they did, though, it wouldn’t necessarily make any difference. If, for instance, Africa put 15 forward candidates for its 13 allocated seats, and the 15 included Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe, at least one of the three pariahs would get through.

If a nation like Zimbabwe stood for election, even if every one of Freedom House’s 88 free nations opposed its candidacy, Robert Mugabe’s regime could still theoretically win a seat, because partly free and unfree nations together exceed the required threshold of 96.

Similarly, if a move was initiated to have Zimbabwe booted off the council, the 88 free democracies could not do so without the support of another 40 countries for whom human rights are less pressing.

Perhaps the only consolation of this provision lies in the fact that if one day, in a fit of indigestion or messianic fervour, people like Fidel Castro or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to get the US booted off the council, they too would need to find 128 votes to do so.

They would not likely succeed.

But they’ll still be cheering in Cairo and Beijing over another provision of the resolution that makes it impossible for any member to serve more than two consecutive three-year terms. At least one year in every seven, they’ll reckon, they can look forward to not being hectored in Geneva by the US

This enforced regular absence applies equally to repressive regimes and democracies.

But then, as Freedom House has pointed out, there are a lot more of them than there are of us.

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About the Author

Patrick Goodenough is a Pacific Rim-based correspondent for an American online news service, CNSNews.com.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Patrick Goodenough

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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