US Alone in Opposing New Human Rights Council

According to IPS, the United States is now completely alone in opposing the U.N. proposal to create a new Human Rights Council. A significant majority of the U.N.’s 191 member states have come out in favor of the proposal, including the 25-member European Union and the 114-member Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of developing nations.

The proposal is also supported by nearly all of the major human-rights groups, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations Foundation, Citizens for Global Solutions, Human Rights First, International Commission of Jurists, ActionAid International, and the World Organisation Against Torture. Together, the groups have released the following statement:

We believe that the draft resolution to establish a Human Rights Council presented by the President of the General Assembly is a sound basis to strengthen the UN’s human rights machinery. World leaders pledged to do this when they met at the September 2005 World Summit. We call on all states to join the consensus that has emerged in countries from all regions of the world and to adopt the draft resolution. The proposed Human Rights Council will be better equipped than the existing Commission on Human Rights to address urgent, serious and long-running human rights situations wherever they occur. It will hold more frequent meetings throughout the year instead of only one. More competitive election procedures will encourage a membership that is more dedicated to the protection of human rights. Instead of slates being adopted by acclamation, members must be elected individually and a higher threshold of votes applies – at least 96 individual votes out of 191 members. A country’s human rights record will be taken into account by those voting and those committing gross violations of human rights can be suspended from the body. All members must fully cooperate with the Council and they will undergo a review of their human rights record through a new universal review system that will apply to all countries. This is an historic opportunity to create a better human rights protection system within the United Nations.

The key U.S. demand is a 2/3 majority requirement for election to the new Council, which would make it difficult for “habitual human rights abusers” such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Burma to be elected. Jan Eliasson, the president of the General Assembly, lobbied for such a requirement — without much help from John Bolton, who missed 29 out of 30 negotation sessions and made numerous other diplomatic missteps, as I discussed here — but the majority requirement was the best he could do.

There is no question that the new HRC would be better off with a 2/3 requirement. But the majority requirement is a dramatic improvement over the slate system used by the Human Rights Commission, especially given that the voting will be by secret ballot — making it easier for states to cast votes against human-rights offenders they cannot politically or economically afford to oppose publicly.

Bolton’s unwavering opposition to the HRC is also — and predictably — turning into a public-relations disaster for the U.S., leading many states to conclude that the real reason the U.S. opposes the HRC is that it is fears becoming one of the HRC’s primary targets:

“We feel that the United States is in reality trying to weaken the U.N. human rights machinery, not strengthening it, perhaps for selfish reasons,” says one Third World diplomat. With rising criticism of U.S. human rights abuses, particularly in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, Washington is fearful of the fact that the torture and mistreatment of prisoners by U.S. soldiers will be high on the agenda of the new Human Rights Council. “I can see no other reason why Washington wants to kill the proposal,” he added.