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| Author: | Robert McMahon, Deputy Editor |
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March 1, 2006
The world's primary human rights body—the UN Human Rights Commission—has become discredited in recent years because repressive states have regularly gained membership to block attempts to curb abuses. Experts view reform of the commission as crucial to restoring the credibility of the entire United Nations. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in March 2005 unveiled a proposal to replace the commission with a smaller, permanent human rights council with tougher membership criteria. But UN General Assembly negotiations have produced a draft agreement softening some of the guidelines for a new council. While Annan and some prominent human rights watchdogs say the new body still represents an improvement over the commission, the United States has rejected the proposal as inadequate and is calling for a new round of negotiations. U.S. opposition to the new panel could delay a vote on the proposed council and encourage efforts in the U.S. Congress to link UN funding with reform of its principle human rights organization.
In his report to the General Assembly last year, Annan said the 53-member commission has been undermined by "declining credibility and professionalism" due to a practice in which autocratic states banded together to block scrutiny of their records. China regularly defeated efforts to even discuss its record. Critics note that Libya—widely criticized for its poor human rights record—recently chaired the commission and that, in the spring of 2004, the commission declined to take tough action against Sudan despite reports of rampant abuses by government-sponsored forces in the western province of Darfur. Sudan was elected to the commission soon after that session. The composition of the commission is a sore point with the UN's largest donor, the United States, in particular the U.S. Congress. "[The commission] is a public relations nightmare for the UN on Capitol Hill," says Steven Dimoff, an expert on U.S.-UN relations for the United Nations Association of the United States.
A subsidiary body of the General Assembly, the 54-member Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) holds annual votes for members to serve three-year terms on the commission. Members are proposed by the UN's five regional groups, with no criteria for membership, and they can serve unlimited consecutive terms. The commission meets every March for six-weeks in Geneva.
The panel would remain in Geneva, shrink to forty-seven members, and become a permanent body rather than only meet for the annual six-week session. The draft proposal calls for it to meet for at least three sessions per year for a "total duration of no less than ten weeks." Members would still be elected to three-year terms by a majority of the entire General Assembly, rather than through a majority chosen by the smaller Economic and Social Council. Members will not be eligible for immediate re-election after two consecutive terms.
The main difference from the old commission, experts say, is a clause requiring members of the panel to undergo a review of their rights records, which did not exist before. In addition, a two-thirds majority vote by the UN General Assembly can suspend the rights of membership in the Council of any member committing "gross and systematic" human rights violations. Lee Feinstein, CFR's senior fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and International Law, says these new clauses mark an important turning point for the organization. "The fact that the UN is acknowledging that not all nations should be treated the same, that what they do for and to their citizens and those within their borders matters, is the fundamental point," he said.
Annan and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour have come out in support of the new council as an improvement on the old commission. Prominent nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International also back the new body and twelve Nobel Peace laureates have released a letter saying they believe the proposed council will be more responsive to human rights violations. European Union (EU) states mostly support the body, after dropping a long-standing request for members to be elected by a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly. The Group of 77—the group of developing countries—had lobbied for measures eliminating tough membership criteria. Still, the country chairing the G-77, South Africa, has expressed its support for the proposed new panel.
U.S. Ambassador to the Untied Nations John Bolton has called the draft unacceptable because it does not go far enough to keep repressive states off the panel. Mark Lagon, the U.S. State Department's deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs, said recently, "We don't want to settle for something that is just a change in name and schedule." U.S. officials want more assurances that states with poor rights record are kept off the panel and are calling for the election of members to the smaller body to require a strict two-thirds majority vote in the General Assembly. Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, raises concern about the proposal's move to reduce the number of representatives from the UN's Western regional group—which traditionally has more rights champions—and the increase in members from the African and Asian regional groups. Writing in National Review, Bayefsky says the proposal to rotate states off the Council every two terms means the United States, which has been a member of the commission every year except one since 1947, would no longer play a leading role on the commission.
The vote to approve a new human rights council would be taken in the UN General Assembly, where the United States does not have veto power. But experts say it will likely cause a delay in voting for the new rights body, probably until after the next—and presumably last—meeting of the Human Rights Commission, set for March 13 to April 21 in Geneva. There is concern among human rights advocates that the United States will choose not to send a delegation to Geneva as a sign of protest. The United States, although buffeted by criticism of its treatment of detainees in the war on terror, is still widely regarded as a leading champion of human rights in the world and plays an important role in commission meetings. Feinstein says failure to resolve the issue of reforming the rights body leaves the international community with a "discredited institution that is a major obstacle to improving the operation of the entire UN and an obstacle to better U.S.-UN relations." Some UN states worry reopening the negotiations will mean a loss of even the modest improvements to the rights panel.
Republican members of the U.S. Congress have introduced legislation that would link U.S. contributions to the United Nation's 2007 budget to progress in reforming areas like human rights. A leading rights advocate in Congress, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), criticized the rights council as a "flawed proposal which empowers dictatorships." Dimoff of the United Nations Association says, "I think there's skepticism [in Congress] about the UN's ability to reform itself in any meaningful way."
The UN Human Rights Commission was founded in 1946 to establish legal norms to protect fundamental rights and freedoms worldwide. It has also over time developed into a forum where states and NGOs can voice their concerns on the behavior of states toward rights issues. Edward Luck, an expert on the UN at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, says the United Nations has been crucial in establishing international standards for human rights. "If it hadn't been for the UN, we probably wouldn't have any kind of international normative structure on human rights," Luck says.
Rights experts say one of the commission's most important roles is producing the so-called "naming and shaming" resolutions singling out countries for their questionable human rights records. Countries lobby furiously to defeat such votes or, in the successful case of China, to remove all attempts to debate their records. Experts say such resolutions can have a big impact in closed societies where civic groups are unable to operate. The move by commission members to implement agreed-on human rights norms by approving tough resolutions is what led to abusive states seeking to gain membership on the panel to block punitive actions, says Luck. "In essence, the commission has been weakened precisely because it was doing some of the work it was supposed to do." Experts also stress the importance of the dozens of rapporteurs, or experts, appointed by the commission to investigate and expose abusive countries and issues such as torture, religious freedom, and trafficking in humans.
Some experts say the lack of shared democratic values among UN members bedevils efforts at reforming UN human rights structures. The U.S. congressionally mandated task force on UN reform last year issued a report saying a human rights council should ideally be composed of democracies. CFR's Feinstein says one way to engage the U.S. Congress in the human rights reform effort is for the Bush administration to adopt a policy of working outside the new rights panel through a still informal new body known as the UN democracy caucus. This could be a way to prod the panel to operate honorably, he says. If the proposed rights council is approved, experts say members of the democracy caucus will be watched closely to see whether they promote worthy countries from their regional groups.
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