March 6, 2006

Fake Reform At UNCHR

A bevy of former Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Jimmy Carter, have produced a letter calling for U.N. approval of the text for "reform" of the current discredited version of the United Nations Council on Human Rights. Carter has called it "a good compromise", and has said he hopes that United States objections to it will be outvoted by other U.N. members. (It may be helpful to remember here that Carter also thought the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea was "a good compromise."...it did win him the Peace Prize, after all.)

I have been accumulating articles on the subject for a couple of weeks now, and would like to share some of the arguments in opposition to United States approval for this so-called reform. I happen to be one of a growing number of people who are convinced that the U.N. as presently constituted is incapable of real reform, which is yet another reason not to sign on to something that purports to be an improvement over the status quo, but isn't... as the WSJ argues:

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton has made it clear to his U.N. colleagues that the current proposal is not something the Bush Administration can endorse. That's a stand that will surely burnish his reputation in certain liberal circles as an "obstructionist." But fake reform is worse than no reform at all, and whatever else might be said of the current system, it at least has the virtue of being discredited.

The world can certainly wait a few months more to get the human-rights agency that genuine human-rights victims deserve. The fact that the U.N. is incapable of providing one is yet another reminder of what ails the organization, especially under its current management.


Here's Anne Bayefsky:

Regardless of its content, Secretary General Kofi Annan desperately wants the creation of this new council to stand as the crowning achievement of his nine years in office. So, shortly after the text was announced, Annan released a statement dramatically raising the stakes. He claimed that failure to adopt Eliasson’s proposal “would undermine this Organization’s credibility, render the commitments made by world leaders meaningless, and deal a blow to the cause of human rights.”

The reality, however, is that the proposed council represents an enormous step backward for the international protection of human rights and the spread of democratic governance....

...The heart of the problem with the commission lies with its membership. Current members include some of the world's worst human-rights violators: China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Throughout the months of negotiations over a new entity, such states vehemently opposed efforts to introduce criteria for membership on the council. They succeeded. Not one criterion is included. Instead, the draft merely suggests “when electing members” a state's human-rights record be "taken into account." Even states under Security Council sanction for human-rights violations (although this includes, at the moment, only Sudan and Côte d’Ivoire) would not be excluded automatically.

Read the whole Bayefsky piece for her more detailed criticism of this Kofi Annan fig leaf.

National Review editorial

Without meaningful eligibility requirements, any "reform" of the UNCHR is unworthy of the name. The UNCHR's basic problem — which is, come to think of it, also the basic problem of the U.N. — is that it puts liberal democracies side by side with genocidal despotisms as though they were equally legitimate. That's how it happened that six of the 53 current UNCHR members — China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe — are on Freedom House's list of the worst human-rights abusers. That's also why the UNCHR has barred Israel from its meetings over invented human-rights abuses while failing to rouse itself to action against real ones (to take one example, it has never passed a resolution against the Chinese government). The proposed human-rights council would do nothing to solve this problem. Even a laughably weak eligibility criterion — that any country under U.N. sanction for human-rights violations be barred from membership — self-destructed during the negotiations.

Brett D. Schaefer, writing at NRO:

When asked about the negotiations over the Human Rights Council, U.S Ambassador John Bolton declared, "We want a butterfly. We're not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success." Such a position indicates a willingness to walk away from the Council if the chrysalis does not yield a butterfly. The question is, what is there to walk toward? Another round of fruitless negotiations in the U.N.? Indisputably, the effort to strengthen basic human rights and representative government could be greatly bolstered by an effective human rights body in the U.N. Sadly, such a body does not exist today, and news reports on the Human Rights Council negotiations indicate that such a body is unlikely to be created soon....

...Human-rights advocates should not shy away from uncomfortable truths. Perhaps the U.N. will one day be dominated by democratic states that respect the freedoms of their citizens and demand similar standards from all U.N. member states. But that is not the U.N. of today. The likely failure of the U.S. and other nations to create a smaller, more effective Human Rights Council that excludes human-rights abusers and non-democracies from membership should be a clear sign that the U.N. cannot serve as the focal point for human-rights abuses. If the U.N. cannot serve as the primary vehicle in pursuit of that goal, the U.S. and like minded countries should pursue alternatives.

The Islamic lobby has managed to insert a clause that has generated a lot of negative reaction, and not just from conservative commentators, it should be noted:

Apart from such concerns as those relating to membership criteria and size, some critics are also unhappy with a last-minute addition to the text's preamble, made at the insistence of the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) because of the current dispute over cartoon depictions of Mohammed.

It refers to "the need for all states to continue international efforts to enhance dialogue and broaden understanding among civilizations, cultures and religions and emphasizing the states, regional organizations, non-governmental organizations, religious bodies and the media have an important role to play in promoting tolerance, respect for and freedom of religion and belief."

Observers noted that there was no explicit endorsement of freedom of speech.

U.N. Watch, a Geneva-based NGO, said the clause "would impose demands on the media to respect religion, but ... omits any mention of freedom of speech or freedom of the press."

"This rewards the violent agitators who burned buildings and killed innocent people [during anti-cartoon riots] with a grant of international legitimacy," said the group's executive director, Hillel Neuer, whose overall assessment of the proposal was that "this is hardly mission accomplished."

International Humanist and Ethical Union president Roy Brown worried that the clause would allow the OIC "to stop NGOs discussing human rights abuse by OIC states on the grounds of 'failure to respect' religion."...

...U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour acknowledged the text was not ideal but said "there is no reason to believe that more negotiating time will yield a better result."

Sorry, but that's not a good enough reason for the United States to go along with this charade.

Related:

U.S. State Dept. release of 2/27/06

Posted by dan at March 6, 2006 8:42 PM