Development & Aid, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, Poverty & SDGs

POLITICS: Consensus Near on Permanent U.N. Rights Body

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2006 (IPS) - After several months of closed-door bickering, the 191 U.N. member states are expected to vote next week on a General Assembly resolution calling for the creation of a new Human Rights Council that should be up and running by May this year.

Submitting his proposals detailing the functions and composition of the Council, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson said the proposals were the product of intense negotiations since late last year.

“I today present to you my best attempt to formulate a draft resolution on the Human Rights Council,” he told delegates Thursday.

Eliasson is expecting the resolution to be adopted unanimously, but the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) is insisting on a strong operative paragraph on “blasphemy”, arising out of the controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published in European newspapers last month.

The 25-member European Union has expressed reservations over the OIC proposal, leading to a political stalemate.

Asked about reports that U.S. Ambassador John Bolton had indicated he may want to reopen negotiations, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters that Eliasson had extensively consulted with member states before presenting the draft resolution.

“I would suggest that the member states have had enough time to discuss it. The issues are known, and now is the time for a decision,” Annan said.

The proposed new 47-member Council, which will replace the existing 53-member much-maligned Human Rights Commission, is being touted as the supreme U.N. body that will deal year-round with human rights abuses worldwide – unlike the existing body, which met only periodically.

“Despite the fact that the draft (resolution) does not reflect everything that I called for when I proposed a new Council nearly a year ago, there are important elements in it that ensure that the Council will be more than a cosmetic change,” Annan told reporters.

He said he would have preferred that members of the Council be elected by a two-thirds majority rather than by an absolute majority, as presently envisaged.

The text makes it clear, he pointed out, that members of the new Council, elected individually by the General Assembly, “must be committed to the promotion and protection of human rights”.

It also makes it clear that the rights and privileges of members can be suspended if they themselves commit gross and systematic violations of human rights. This has not been the case with the outgoing Commission, Annan said.

The secretary-general said the new Council will also be better placed to address “situations of gross and systematic violations of human rights”.

“Its ability to meet throughout the year, and when necessary for longer than the Commission has done, will allow the Council to sound the alarm and bring urgent human rights crises to the attention of the world community,” he noted.

The United States and Western Europe have also consistently criticised the composition of the soon-to-be-defunct Human Rights Commission because it continued to elect member states such as Sudan, Zimbabwe and Libya – all of whom have at one time or another been accused of human rights violations by Western nations.

The membership of the new Council will be based on equitable geographic distribution and seats shall be distributed among regional groups: 13 for the African Group; 13 for the Asian Group; eight for the Latin American and Caribbean group; six for the Eastern European Group; and seven for the Western European and Other States Group.

All members, who will have term limits, will serve for three years but will not be eligible for immediate re-election after two consecutive terms.

The General Assembly, by a two-thirds majority of the members present and voting, may suspend the rights of membership in the Council of a member of the Human Rights Council that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights.

Ambassador Vanu Gopala Menon of Singapore, who has been closely monitoring the negotiations, told IPS: “I think that the president (of the General Assembly) has produced a balanced and good draft which has tried to meet most, if not all, of the critical concerns of both developed and developing countries.”

Of course, he said, it will not make everyone completely happy. “But, if any delegation got everything it wanted, it would be less of a negotiation and more of a capitulation by one side or another.”

“What we have now is a well-conceived and workable text that broadly captures the middle ground. I commend the president for his efforts,” he added.

Phyllis Bennis, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, said that at the end of the day, U.N. human rights arrangements reflect the stark reality that the United Nations is an intergovernmental – not an international – institution.

“That means that the interests of people will remain secondary to the interests of governments,” Bennis told IPS.

The new Human Rights Council ensures a role for human rights organisations, civil society, national human rights agencies and other non-governmental forces that will help to hold governments accountable.

And especially by raising the position of human rights to one equal to peace and security and development, it may be able to begin to put the United Nations institutionally on the side of peoples fighting for the realisation of all their human rights.

These include the right to live in an independent country free from occupation, the right to food and clean water, the right to return to one’s home after war, expulsion or natural disaster, she said.

“Maybe even the systematic U.S. violations of human rights – including its embrace of the death penalty – will finally be deemed a fit subject for United Nations oversight,” Bennis said.

She also pointed out that the new Human Rights Council includes some improvements to the working of the former Human Rights Commission, but it is clear that the U.S.-led demand to create an entirely new human rights instrument for the United Nations was driven by political, not substantive demands.

“All of the substantive improvements could have been made to the Commission, without needing to eliminate one U.N. body and creating an entirely new version of more or less the same thing,” Bennis said.

One important improvement is the elevating of human rights to be recognised as one of the three pillars of the United Nations system – equivalent to the position of peace and security and development in the U.N. hierarchy.

She said the new arrangement also places greater emphasis on certain human rights – notably economic, social and cultural rights, and the right to development – traditionally given short shrift in U.N. prioritising.

The composition of the new Council will not likely look very different from that of the old Commission.

“That reality reflects the failure of the John Bolton-led U.S. effort to impose an entirely new human rights infrastructure on the United Nations, one that would privilege those countries given a seal of approval by Washington to serve on the Council, with others, especially those in bad graces in Washington, prohibited from serving,” she said.

In practice, that would have meant that U.S. allies – regardless of their human rights records – would be welcome on the Council, while Washington’s strategic adversaries would find their human rights records enough to keep them off.