Recently, the United Nations General Assembly voted to abolish its discredited Human Rights Commission and replace it with a stronger Human Rights Council. Whether the council lives up to its promise depends on the political will of governments as they elect the first members of the new body.
The commission had a proud history. In its early days, under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt, it drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Later, it prepared international standards on torture, “disappearances” and executions, and reached out to the victims of apartheid and the dictatorial regimes of Latin America. After the Cold War, it took strong stands against abusers, both north and south. It established a system of independent monitors to probe torture, political killings and violence against women and seek to measure governments’ respect for basic human rights.
Recently, however, the commission had descended into farce as abusive states vied for membership to protect themselves and their cohorts from condemnation. Situations from Chechnya to Zimbabwe became hostage to diplomatic back-rubbing and bloc politics. Reform was attempted in 1998 under the leadership of South African ambassador Jacob Selebi but was blocked by a core of rejectionists.
Last year, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan finally did the unthinkable and said the best way to improve the commission was to throw it away and replace it with a smaller council that would stand as a “society of the committed”. After a year of intense negotiations that council has emerged as a substantial improvement.
Unlike the commission, which met only once for six weeks, the council will meet at least three times for 10 weeks, with a right for one-third of its members to call additional sessions “when needed”. A new universal review procedure will scrutinise the records of even the most powerful countries -- potentially redressing the double standards of which the Commission was guilty. Members are bound to “fully cooperate” -- an improvement on current practice, in which some members of the commission bar access to the UN investigators.
The biggest change, however, will be how members are selected. Under the current system, they are put forward by regional groups and rubber stamped by the UN Economic and Social Council. The African members, put forward by the “African group”, now include Sudan and Zimbabwe. Election to the council will require the high threshold of an affirmative vote by an absolute majority of the UN’s 191 members -- that is, 96 positive votes.
The General Assembly resolution creating the council calls on all states to “take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights and their ... commitments made thereto”.
The move to the council was adopted by a vote of 170 to four. Only the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands voted against, arguing that the new rules did not go far enough in assuring that rights abusers would be kept off the council.
But the US can be proved wrong when council elections are held on May 9. Mexico has announced, for example, that it will not engage in the hoary UN practice of “bartering votes” and will not “disclose its voting intentions, thus avoiding the influence of factors foreign to the human-rights agenda”. African countries should follow suit and agree not to present governments such as Sudan and Zimbabwe, and vote for only those countries whose record merits election.
The next challenge when the council convenes in June, will be to take effective action on the crisis in Darfur and speak out on other abuses the politicised commission was unable to address. Last year, while African countries circled the wagons in protection of Zimbabwe, the West shamefully did the same on the US prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. South Africa was one of only eight countries to support a resolution calling on the US to allow monitors access to detainees. Five such monitors have now called for the camp to be closed and will present their report to the council. A widely supported UN resolution could finally persuade the Bush administration to rethink its policy.
The new council has the potential to make a difference in the lives of the oppressed -- but only if states give it the tools to do so.
Reed Brody is special counsel with Human Rights Watch
