Departing Rights Official Raised Volume on Issues

by Marlise Simons, The New York Times, July 6, 2008

GENEVA — She has been doing a job with a mandate that many would call impossible: to safeguard human rights around the globe. Yet as Louise Arbour steps down after four years as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, she is not entirely pessimistic.

True, she has no illusions that human rights abuses are on the wane. She also says plainly that the 47 members of the United Nations Human Rights Council often use it as a forum for pushing national or regional interests rather than defending people against assorted horrors.

Nonetheless, Ms. Arbour, 61, a former Supreme Court judge in Canada and, before that, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations tribunals for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said she saw some progress.

“It’s a small miracle to see how far we have come since the 50 years of silence after Nuremberg,” she said, referring to the trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II. “All things considered, in human rights law we have achieved more in the past 15 years than in the previous 50 in taking personal criminal accountability to where it is now.”

In the view of some human rights groups, Ms. Arbour can share credit for this. Although she had no powers to punish abusers, she sharpened the profile of the high commissioner’s office, not only by almost doubling its annual budget to nearly $100 million and widening its presence in the field, but also by persistently raising her own voice.

Amnesty International said that Ms. Arbour, who formally left the job on Monday, had been a champion for human rights and that replacing her would not be easy. Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, is expected to announce her successor shortly.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said Ms. Arbour had been principled and outspoken. In a telephone interview from New York, he added, “Our hope is that the next commissioner not be excessively inclined to practice quiet diplomacy when outspokenness is called for.”

That said, Ms. Arbour’s forthright views have angered many governments and interest groups. This year, Zimbabwe’s justice minister, Patrick Chinamasa, said Ms. Arbour had turned her office into a “deified oracle which spews out edicts we all must follow.” Some supporters of Israel have called her an idiot.

The Bush administration, too, has objected to her frequent complaints about its use of torture, secret arrests and disregard of international law as part of the campaign against terrorism.

Yet Ms. Arbour herself does not regard naming-and-shaming as the high commissioner’s most effective tool. On one of the last days in her office on the banks of Lake Geneva, Ms. Arbour sounded almost defensive about sometimes using quiet diplomacy.

“On my travels, I can see presidents and prime ministers and foreign ministers,” she said. “A lot of nongovernmental organizations don’t have this kind of access. But that calls for a different tone of interaction. There’s no point in screaming if you cannot compel anything.”

She has, however, pressed her way into places like refugee camps and prisons, to the discomfort of her official hosts.

“She’d ask to see political prisoners or rape victims,” said Scott Campbell, an aide who has often traveled with her. “It’s difficult to say no to Louise Arbour.”

Some have said no. North Korea and Myanmar refused to let her in. China said she was always welcome, but recently, when she wanted to travel to Tibet, she was told it was not the right time. She visited Sri Lanka, but the government would not let her open a field office there.

Pakistan kept postponing her trip, finally offering her a date three days before she was to leave office. She accepted. Last week, she admonished the country’s president, Pervez Musharraf, and other high-ranking officials about human rights issues, including “disappearances” and the lack of judiciary independence.

But it is what she calls “a very serious erosion” of safeguards against human rights abuses in the United States that has haunted her work.

In many countries, Ms. Arbour said, when she raises human rights concerns with a president or prime minister: “I can write the script. The first response I get is, ‘Why aren’t you in Guantánamo? Why are you coming here?’ ”

But, she added, when she had admonished the United States, she had heard the opposing view. “I recently had a meeting with a group of Congressional aides,” she said, “and they complained, ‘Why aren’t you criticizing Myanmar instead of spending your time criticizing the United States?’ ”

In Geneva itself, pure politics often seem to dominate the Human Rights Council, which in 2006 replaced the politicized United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Ms. Arbour said she welcomed the council’s new policy under which every country’s human rights record would be examined every four years, but she lamented regular attempts in the council to gain control of her office.

The council’s work has often been paralyzed and distorted by regional groups, notably the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the African group, which not only have focused overwhelmingly on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians but also have blocked discussion of such topics as sexual identity, female genital cutting and so-called honor killings.

“It seems to me that anything that is related to full gender equality is a fundamental human right,” Ms. Arbour said. “But the dictates of culture or religion or tradition are often put forward as clashing with that. It’s the wrong debate.”