Ambitious plans to reform the United Nations in the wake of the oil-for-food scandal and the Iraq schism have yet to amount to much. But one issue on which world leaders attending last September’s summit in New York did agree was the need to strengthen UN monitoring, protection and enforcement of universal standards of human rights.
Now even that limited consensus is at risk as open diplomatic warfare between the Bush administration and a majority of member states threatens to sink proposals to create a new UN Human Rights Council. If a compromise deal backed by the General Assembly president, Jan Eliasson, is not agreed by Friday, the council may be shelved indefinitely. That could derail other internal reforms promoted by Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General. It could reinforce perceptions, voiced by one UN official, that John Bolton, the US ambassador, is embarked on a ”nihilist” slash and burn mission at the UN.
But more importantly, failure to establish the new high-status international watchdog could actually reduce effective assistance to victims of ongoing human rights abuse in countries ranging from Burma to Sudan — the exact opposite of what the September summiteers intended. This week’s annual session in Geneva of the UN Human Rights Commission, the discredited body that the new council would replace, has been virtually paralysed by the impasse in New York.
”The commission will continue until the creation of a council,” its chairperson, Manuel RodrÃÂguez Cuadros, said. But diplomats described chaotic behind-the-scenes efforts to hold together an agenda that had been expected to focus on abuses in Sudan, North Korea and Guantánamo Bay. Independent human rights groups are urging the US to accept the proffered compromise rather than demand a General Assembly vote, which they fear could unravel five months of negotiations. ”The proposed new council is a major improvement,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
While conceding that the council was far from perfect, he said ”it would be reckless for the US to force a vote because that will invite amendments from spoiler states to weaken the council”.
Amnesty International said: ”The US should not jeopardise … the best chance in decades to establish a more effective UN human rights body.”
Washington’s main objections are that under the new rules serial human rights abusers such as Zimbabwe and Syria, which gained seats on the UN commission in the past, could repeat the exercise in the new council unless voting arrangements are further tightened. It also wants it to be easier to suspend members and to circumscribe nominations by regional groups of countries.
”The plan offered by the General Assembly does not do enough to redress these weaknesses,” said Newt Gingrich and George Mitchell, senior US politicians who led a congressional taskforce on UN reform. Membership should also be denied to ”to any states under UN sanctions and/or states unwilling to accept monitoring missions”.
A British official said EU countries had been prepared to accept the compromise but were now trying to satisfy American doubts. ”It met most of our ‘red lines’ but the US said ‘no’. So we’re looking at it again. We don’t want it to develop into a US versus the rest scenario.” Bolton’s hardball tactics may already have produced that very outcome. ”Better to continue to try to get our butterfly than to accept this caterpillar with lipstick on it,” he said last week.
And the state department’s annual review of global human rights will not have endeared the US to its UN interlocutors. It criticised China and many other developing countries last week; and highlighted abuses by Iraqi security forces and militias. But it made no mention of US actions in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantánamo Bay. – Guardian Unlimited Â