The United Nations Human Rights Council will open a three-week session on Monday with member states and top officials smarting from Sudan’s rebuffing a mission to assess the situation in strife-torn Darfur.
The fledgling and divided assembly, which replaced the largely discredited commission in 2006, is struggling to build up its monitoring rules by a mid-year deadline.
The stand-off over Sudan will have a telling impact on its future, diplomats said.
”It will be a major battle. Behind the smokescreen, there is a fundamental philosophical question here for the Human Rights Council,” a senior European Union official said.
Sudan last month stopped a human rights assessment mission headed by Nobel peace laureate and anti-landmines campaigner Jody Williams from reaching the western region by maintaining uncertainty over visas, UN officials said.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon said he was ”very disappointed” by Sudan’s stance.
The mission was set up by a rare consensus of the council’s 47 members following hard bargaining between Western, African and Islamic nations during a special session in December on human rights violations in Darfur.
The troubled mission’s report is due to be made public in Geneva on Monday after being forwarded to Khartoum over the weekend, a UN source said. It is due to be debated in the council on Thursday.
The council must decide how it copes with countries that obstruct probes or monitoring — a problem its predecessor faced repeatedly with several states, the EU official said.
”We have a problem with non-cooperation by Sudan,” he underlined. ”We will propose action; we cannot remain silent on that.”
The council and UN human rights experts have no enforcement powers to stop abuse.
But their ability to name and shame triggers considerable defensive politics by targeted governments, suggesting that scrutiny is a strong lever, diplomats underlined.
The UN’s top human rights official, High Commissioner Louise Arbour, last Tuesday urged the 47 states to think ”creatively” about singling out ”maybe … the biggest shortcoming of any government”.
”I think the council will be well advised to try to design a mechanism that will ensure that … non-cooperation and obstruction is an affront to the council to be addressed appropriately,” Arbour told journalists.
In a separate event, she later said Sudanese government action to stop sexual violence alone in Darfur was ”grossly inadequate”.
The council’s record so far prompted the United States to announce last Tuesday that it would again not seek a seat on the council this year.
”It spent the entire year slamming Israel — four separate hearings by the Human Rights Council of the UN on Israel, but not against Burma, and not against Zimbabwe, and not against North Korea and not against Iran,” US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns told a congressional hearing.
The EU official said: ”We deplore the US decision.”
But he signalled that the council’s future rulebook must be even-handed.
Israel has also refused to cooperate with council-appointed missions and experts probing human rights abuse in the Middle East, saying the Arab-initiated efforts are biased by targeting only the Jewish state.
”It goes beyond Israel, it goes beyond Darfur,” the EU diplomat said.
”We cannot be selective on cooperation — what we say on Darfur has to apply somewhere else,” he added.
Before the end of June, Western and developing nations also need to overcome differences over the independence of investigators, examinations of individual countries and the role of NGOs.
The EU signalled there was a ”red line” that cannot be crossed. ”We want an improvement over the Human Rights Commission and we won’t accept a package that will end in rolling back human rights,” the official said. — Sapa-AFP