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Making a fresh start
The UN's new human rights council will need time to improve on the performance of its discredited predecessor, writes Ian Black

Friday June 23, 2006

    United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty.
 
Kofi Annan sounded a slightly plaintive note when he inaugurated the UN's new human rights council at the organisation's Geneva headquarters this week. But his call for "a clean break from the past" was widely appreciated: the dysfunctional body it is replacing was seen as corrupt and ineffective, good only for sordid backroom deals and sterile grandstanding.

The council is an important part of Annan's much-heralded 60th-birthday UN reform package, "In Larger Freedom," which was endorsed by the World Summit in New York last autumn amid hopes for a better overall performance at the start of the 21st century.

These are early days for this new star in the UN firmament, a reflection of increasing awareness of human rights issues and the world body's solemn "responsibility to protect" after disasters in Bosnia and Rwanda.

Still, given the issues involved - and the old arguments about universal values, western liberalism and respect for national sovereignty and other cultures lurking in the background - it's hard to be wildly optimistic about its prospects.

Geneva is a poignant setting for the UN, the faded grandeur of the lakeside buildings of the Palais des Nations redolent of the failures of the League of Nations in the interwar period. The atmosphere at the steel and glass tower overlooking Manhattan's East River is somehow brisker, even when things are moving slowly.

On paper the new council is a significant improvement on the old UN human rights commission. It has enhanced status as a subsidiary body of the general assembly - where all 191 member states are represented. It is also to hold more meetings and can convene in an emergency. That's not just a technical detail since the commission took over a year to consider the Andijan massacre of hundreds of demonstrators in Uzbekistan because it happened just after the annual session had closed.

Most importantly, the council is to examine the human rights records of its own members - and eventually of all UN member states - using a mechanism known in UN jargon as a "universal periodic review". Obvious? Not really. One reason the old commission was seen as a bad joke was that some of the world's most unsavoury regimes escaped scrutiny or condemnation while routinely attacking their enemies, especially Israel and the US.

No wonder it was known as the "abusers club" when states were represented by people like Iraq's Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's half-brother and sometime secret police chief, during the darkest days of Ba'athist tyranny. In 2003 the commission was chaired by Libya, hardly a beacon of freedom and tolerance. In recent years it failed to even adopt resolutions on crises as grave as Iraq, Chechnya and Darfur.

For most human rights activists the old commission embodied the worst tradition of the political fix, one country backing a resolution by another but only on the basis of deals stitched up behind closed doors. "Diplomacy is always about horsetrading but this was much more sordid than the ordinary," says one.

Annan's optimism needs to be treated with caution. Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia all won seats on the council despite their poor human rights records, although Iran was defeated. The US, Zimbabwe and Sudan declined to submit their candidacy.

Cuba praised its own election and taunted Washington - under fire for the war in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib - for staying away. "The absence of the United States is the defeat of lies; it is the moral punishment for the haughtiness of an empire," declared Felipe Perez Roque, Fidel Castro's foreign minister.

Liberal Americans think the Bush administration is making a mistake. "We should not turn the new council into a pariah before it has begun to work, " argued Nancy Rubin, the US representative under the Clinton administration. "We ought not to turn our back on any opportunity to advance human rights throughout the world."

Judging by the opening speeches, there are plenty of different views about rights and freedoms. "China," declared its deputy foreign minister, "faces numerous problems left over from the past and mounting pressure posed by a vast population, shortage of resources and environmental degradation. This means that progress in human rights and other areas will be a long-term endeavour."

Saudi Arabia's delegate defended the use of sharia law, which includes beheadings and amputations for some crimes". But there were protests, led by Canada, when Iran's observer mission included the notorious prosecutor-general, Saeed Mortazavi, implicated in torture, illegal detention and coercing false confessions. Zimbabwe's justice minister accused the developed world of interfering with his country's internal affairs and supporting regime change through opposition parties.

"We are not naive," Mariette Grange, Geneva representative of the Washington based Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian. "We know that not only angels were elected to the council. But we do have more effective tools. What we will need now is political will. When there is a difficult issue we will need governments with the courage to lay them on the table."

Last year, for example, as Cuba hammered away at the US over Guantanamo Bay, the Europeans remained silent. If they had spoken out, the parameters of the debate would have changed. Supporters point to the value of UN "special rapporteurs" representing the council, dealing with specific countries as well as wider global themes such as torture, forced disappearances and violence against women.

The opening session was supposed to be restricted to speeches and procedural matters before the September meeting addresses substantive "country situations". Inevitably though, controversy is already in the air with Muslim countries seeking to condemn Israel for abuses in the Palestinian territories, a classic case of what HRW wearily calls "politicisation and selectivity".

Predictably, Israel's supporters are fighting back. "Why do free countries remain silent while Saudi Arabia, a country whose schoolbooks continue to teach hatred of Christians and other non-Muslims, has the gall to lecture the world on religious intolerance?" asked UN Watch, an NGO affiliated to the World Jewish Congress. "Or when Syria, which continues to assassinate Lebanese politicians and journalists, and otherwise flout security council resolutions, lectures the world on occupation?"

That's an early taste of what Kofi Annan meant when he called on the new body to avoid "political point-scoring or petty manoeuvre". But for anyone trying to set the world to rights, it's the style that goes with this difficult territory.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1804639,00.html