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

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.