Meet the New UNHRC: Same as the Old UNHRC?

The new UN Human Rights Council is holding an emergency session today in Geneva. The agenda: A resolution condemning Israeli actions in the current war between Israel and Hezbollah. This is supposed to be the new and improved Human Rights Council, the one that will take seriously its charge to address human rights violations everywhere. Yet, since its inception this spring, the Council has called only two special sessions and passed three resolutions addressing the human rights practices of a country — all aimed at Israel.

In this editorial in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch noted last week’s subversion of the Committee on the Elmination of Racism (CERD) which suspended its normal work to debate a resolution on Israel:

Brazilian expert Jos Augusto Lindgren Alves accused Israel of “blatant racism,” which, he added, was “at the root of its disproportionality” in Lebanon. He asked if Israel “would react the same way to exterminate an entire population if Hizbullah launched the same attacks from a non-Arab country.” Jos Francisco Cali Tzay of Guatemala suggested that Israel’s actions were close to “mass genocide.” The South African, Patricia January-Bardhill, said that Israel’s response reflected “institutionalized racism.” Pakistani member Agha Shahi justified Hizbullah’s attacks on Israel as an exercise of “the right of resistance against occupation.”

Aboul-Nasr similarly asserted that Hizbullah is not a terrorist group but “a resistance movement,” like the French resistance in World War II. Never mind that the UN in 2000 certified Israel’s complete withdrawal from southern Lebanon to the international border, or that, in the words of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “Hizbullah’s provocative attack on July 12 was the trigger of this particular crisis.”

This sounds disturbingly familiar. For years, the UN Human Rights Commission went out of its way to condemn the actions of Israel while looking the other way at the human rights violations of other member states. (A full 30% of the UNHRC’s resolutions over a 40-year period were aimed against Israel.)

Fortunately, the human rights community is watching. In addition to UN Watch’s challenge here, Human Rights Watch yesterday issued this statement to the HR Council which examines the potential violations of international humanitarian law on both sides of the conflict. (Importantly, HRW makes clear the illegality of Hezbollah’s use of human shields and firing of rockets which are, by their nature, indiscriminate.) In a statement to the Council today, UN Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour has similarly noted that any resolution by the Council must be even-handed and address human rights violations by all parties. She rightly calls for the work of the Council to focus on redress of victims — whoever and wherever they are.

It is well within the purview of the new Human Rights Council to monitor carefully the conflict in Israel and Lebanon (as well as in Gaza) and call attention to violations of IHL and the importance of protecting civilians and making humanitarian assistance available to victims in the region. (I do not share Neuer’s view that the UNHRC’s actions here violate the UN Charter.) But it would be more than unfortunate if the new body further dilutes its credibility by caving to political forces that want to single out Israel.