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HUMAN RIGHTS: Developing Countries Regain the Initiative in UN Council

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Mar 30 2007 (IPS) - The United Nations Human Rights Council’s fourth session wrapped up Friday with good results, particularly because developing countries “regained the initiative,” said Swiss academic Jean Ziegler, U.N. Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Delegates from the Asian and African groups and from progressive Latin American governments took the offensive in the highest U.N. human rights body, “to confront neo-colonialism in the field of human rights,” Zeigler told IPS.

He was referring to what happened during the Council’s first year of debates, which ended Friday with the close of the fourth session, in which assessments of human rights violations by individual countries disappeared in practice because of the paralysis of the “special procedures” for studying human rights questions and violations.

Ziegler did agree, however, that there is a “vacuum of protection” for human rights in the U.N. system caused by the transfer of power from the now-defunct Commission on Human Rights to the year-old Council.

The last session of the Commission was held in March and April 2005. Since then, no declarations or resolutions on the human rights records of countries have been adopted, nor has the fate of the “special procedures” been defined.

These mechanisms can be comprised of individuals (“special rapporteurs”, “special representatives” or “independent experts”) or working groups who investigate and report on human rights issues and on abuses committed in specific countries.

The case of Sudan, the highest-profile focus of the session that ended Friday, represents only in part an exception to this “vacuum of protection,” because the Council failed to issue a clear condemnation of the Sudanese government for the abuses committed in the western region of Darfur.

The resolution approved by the Council, a compromise between competing texts proposed by the African Group and the European Union, expresses profound concern over the grave human rights violations in Darfur and establishes a group made up of seven U.N. experts charged with working to ensure follow-up and implementation of 115 U.N. recommendations already adopted.

Some two and a half million people have been displaced and between 200,000 and 400,000 people killed – mostly members of three African ethnic groups – in Darfur since February 2003.

Most of the violence over that time has been perpetrated by government forces or government-backed Arab militias called Janjaweed against African groups, although over the past year a rebel coalition has become more aggressive, particularly in northern Darfur.

The crisis in Darfur occupied a large part of the last three weeks of debates in the Council, at times in a negative climate of polarisation, in the words of Mexican delegate Luis Alfonso de Alba, the president of the Council.

In a special session held in December, the Council decided to send to Sudan a mission led by U.S. anti-landmine campaigner and Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams to assess the human rights situation. But the government of the northeast African country refused the five-member team entry.

The government’s refusal represented a second frustration for the Council. A six-member team created in November 2006, headed by South African archbishop and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Desmond Tutu, was to visit the Gaza Strip to investigate the deaths of 19 Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli artillery shells in a residential area of the town of Beit Hanun. But Israel failed to provide timely approval, thus effectively blocking the mission.

With the decision on Darfur, the Council partially shored up its image, commented a Latin American diplomat who preferred not to be identified. The case of Darfur will not be resolved in the Human Rights Council; it is a matter for the U.N. Security Council, he argued.

Nevertheless, the debate helped ease the polarisation that marked the start of the session. It also enabled the African Group to show greater flexibility. Several countries, especially Zambia, but also Senegal, Nigeria, Gabon and Ghana, argued in favour of a compromise agreement, which was eventually reached.

The Latin American source said the strong front defending the Sudanese government, made up of delegates of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Arab Group, had thus been divided.

Amnesty International activist Peter Splinter said the decision showed that “African delegations.are not willing to tolerate turning a blind eye to the violations being perpetrated against the Darfur people in the cause of maintaining ‘African solidarity’.”

In the rest of the decisions approved by the Council, the votes reflected the same gap between developing and industrialised nations that characterised the Commission on Human Rights and that was one of the phenomena that undermined the credibility of the Commission.

The Council adopted resolutions against discrimination based on religion or religious beliefs; the right to development; the effects of globalisation on human rights; and the strengthening of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour.

The bloc of Asian, Africa, Latin American and Caribbean countries split only when it voted on a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion. In this case, nine countries (Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, India, Nigeria, Peru, Uruguay and Zambia) abstained.

Argentine Ambassador Alberto Dumont said that his country would have liked the resolution to maintain a balance between the protection of religion and freedom of expression.

The president of the Council announced that the discussions on the institutional structure of the Council would continue in working groups in April. Some delegates predicted that a draft would be ready in early May for a final debate by the 47 members.

In the meantime, there is a virtual moratorium for countries that violate human rights, said the Latin American diplomat.

“In its nine months of existence, the Council has condemned only one country in the entire world for human rights violations: Israel. At this session, the Council passed yet another – its ninth – resolution against the Jewish state,” protested Hillel Neuer, executive director of the non-governmental U.N. Watch.