Dismay Over New Human Rights Council

by Warren Hoge, The New York Times, March 9, 2007

The United Nations Human Rights Council begins a three-week session in Geneva on Monday amid expressions of frustration from rights advocates at its early performance and alarm over proposals that might weaken it further.

“So far it’s been enormously disappointing, and the opponents of human rights enforcement are running circles around the proponents,” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The council was created in a 170-to-4 vote of the General Assembly a year ago to replace the Human Rights Commission, which had been widely discredited for allowing participation by countries like Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe who used membership to prevent scrutiny of their own records.

The commission was long a major embarrassment to the United Nations, with former Secretary General Kofi Annan, who first proposed its replacement in 2005, commenting that it “cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

When the 47 members of the new council were elected last March, tighter entry requirements succeeded in keeping the most notorious rights abusers off the panel, and there was some hope of less politicized behavior.

But member countries from Africa and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an association of 57 states promoting Muslim solidarity, have dashed those hopes by voting as a bloc to stymie Western efforts to direct serious attention to situations like the killings, rapes and pillage in the Darfur region of Sudan, which the United Nations has declared the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Most notably, as happened with the commission, the council has focused its condemnation almost exclusively on Israel. It has passed eight resolutions against Israel, and the Islamic group is planning four more for the current session. The council has cited no other country for human rights violations.

The United States voted against creating the council last year on the basis that it was not a sufficient improvement over the commission. This past week, it decided for the second straight year not to seek membership on the panel, and R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, linked the decision to the council’s focus on Israel.

“It spent the entire year slamming Israel,” Mr. Burns told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday. He noted that the council had conducted formal hearings against Israel “but not against Burma and not against Zimbabwe and not against North Korea and not against Iran.”

Mr. Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-moon, told a human rights gathering in December that he was “worried by its disproportionate focus on violations by Israel.” The council, he said, “has clearly not justified all the hopes that so many of us placed on it.”

The new session is the fourth formal meeting in the last nine months, and an immediate issue attracting attention as a measure of the council’s purposefulness is what it will do about an assessment mission to Darfur that was barred from entering Sudan last month. The options are to publish a factual report, publish a report with recommendations or take no action.

“What they do with the Sudan mission will be a bellwether for the future of the council,” said Peter G. Splinter, the Amnesty International representative in Geneva. He indicated that he was not optimistic.

“Sudan took the floor last week and said they rejected the mission entirely, and they are going to have the backing of the Organization of the Islamic Conference,” he said. “If the council ducks the situation in Darfur, that’s not going to speak highly to its credibility.”

The Islamic group is expected to cite the fact that Israel barred an assessment mission from entering the Gaza Strip in December and that its leader, Desmond Tutu, the former South African archbishop and antiapartheid campaigner, decided to make no formal recommendations.

“It was a mistake for that mission not to write a report, but if you allow governments to prevent a report by simply not admitting a mission, then you’re giving them a way of silencing the council,” Mr. Roth said.

In another potential blow to the council’s effectiveness, a proposal is circulating that would do away with many of the council’s 41 rapporteurs, the experts who produce sometimes graphic reports of abuses in individual countries. The proposal specifically ensures the continuation of the mission that monitors the Palestinian territories.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based organization that follows United Nations human rights activities, said, “The situation is grim, and one example is that the one aspect that has always been thought of as a bright spot — the experts — may be eliminated.”

The United States, though not able to vote or offer a resolution, can make speeches, exercise the right of reply and apply diplomatic pressure.

Mark Lagon, the deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations, said the United States would be working to persuade democratic nations now participating in regional bloc voting to “vote their consciences.”

He said, “I think there are some members of the African and Asian groups who resent being told what to think.”

The United States is intent on ensuring that no rights violators join the panel when elections for 14 new members are held in the General Assembly in May, Mr. Lagon said. “It’s essential that this council be manned by firefighters rather than arsonists,” he said.

Despite the disappointment with the council’s early performance, Mr. Splinter said that it was premature to give up on the panel because it was still setting up its rules and procedures. It is supposed to resolve these institutional matters by the first anniversary of its opening session, in mid-June.

“It’s going through its adolescence, and it’s awfully painful, but we have to get past it and see what we have in the end,” he said.