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March 04, 2006

Merely a flight of fancy?

Reprinted from South China Morning Post

By Hurst Hannum

It was two months overdue when finally, last week, the president of the United Nations General Assembly proposed a new Human Rights Council. The new body outlined by Sweden’s Jan Eliasson would replace the discredited UN Human Rights Commission. The proposal came after lengthy consultations with governments, but it received a rather unenthusiastic welcome from human-rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, said it should be renegotiated, commenting that “the strongest argument in favour of this draft is that it is not as bad as it could be”.

The Human Rights Council was to have been one of the centrepieces of the UN reform agreed to at a high-level UN summit last September. The new body’s supporters hoped it would be more active and less political than its predecessor, whose reputation was marred by the membership of such notorious humanrights violators as Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Early proposals had sought to cut the former commission’s 53-nation membership substantially and elect new council members by a two-thirds vote of the general assembly, to make it more difficult for violators to be elected.

The Eliasson proposal would create a 47-nation council – a meaningless reduction from the present size – whose members would be individually elected by an absolute majority of the general assembly. States would be permitted to serve no more than two consecutive three-year terms, thus eliminating the de facto permanent membership of the major powers.

The general assembly would get the power to suspend a country from council membership – by a two-thirds vote – if it “commits gross and systematic violations of human rights”.

The old commission met for six weeks annually, but the new council would meet regularly throughout the year. While the commission was frequently accused of political bias in selecting the situations that it discussed, the council would undertake a periodic review of the human-rights performance of all states, based on “an interactive dialogue with the full involvement of the country concerned”.

The council would also review the plethora of special mechanisms, such as rapporteurs and working groups, which have been created over the years to deal with specific human-rights issues. Where necessary, it may “improve and rationalise” them. The controversy over the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed led Muslim states to demand a special provision on the need for tolerance for religious sensibilities. So, the Eliasson proposal’s preamble calls upon “states, regional organisations, non-governmental organisations, religious bodies and the media” to play a role in “promoting tolerance, respect for and freedom of religion and belief”.

Human-rights advocates must be disappointed by the final result of months of negotiations. No criteria for membership on the council were created, and the election of members by majority rather than a two-thirds vote would make it more difficult to keep violators off the council.

To some extent, however, humanrights groups may find themselves hoist by their own petard. While a universal review may enable some attention to be paid to human-rights violations by major states, does it make sense to give “equal treatment” to Monaco, Tonga, Canada, Zimbabwe and Myanmar? And how are human-rights groups, except the richest western ones, supposed to participate meaningfully in meetings lasting over three months or more?

Efforts to depoliticise human rights at the UN miss the point. Human rights are political, and the UN is the ultimate political institution. In the 1980s, the Human Rights Commission was in the forefront of innovative approaches to monitor human rights and encourage their protection.

A decade later, the violators have simply learned how to play the game better. The rules may have changed slightly, and the goal of eliminating the most blatant ideological or regional bias is laudable, but the new council would be unlikely to operate much differently from the old commission.

The promotion of human rights is not a technical matter akin to revising tax treaties or cross-border adoption procedures – and even those issues can be contentious.

Human rights are about politics, about creating a fair and equal setting in which all members of society can participate in making the difficult social, economic and other decisions faced by all countries in today’s world.

Even if it surpassed its supporters’ most fervent hopes, the new council would not diminish the need for the slow, consistent, politically astute activism at both the national and international levels that is required to ensure human rights are more than a slogan.

Hurst Hannum is Sir Y. K. Pao professor of public law at the University of Hong Kong.

Posted by fletcher at March 4, 2006 02:51 PM