Confronting anti-human rights lobby at UN

Joanna Weschler, Human Rights Watch, Project Syndicate

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson is to be replaced by the Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello, a longtime UN diplomat and former chief of the UN Mission in East Timor, on Sept. 12. That transition will be a tricky one, because the governments that dominate the UN commission for human rights (CHR) are increasingly trying to protect themselves -- and their allies -- from any scrutiny or criticism.

During the last annual session of the CHR, held in Geneva last spring, the body voted one by one to ignore severe human rights violations in such places as Russia/Chechnya, Zimbabwe, Iran and Equatorial Guinea. For several other violators -- such as China, Algeria, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia -- the CHR couldn't even muster the will to put their abuses on its agenda.

It also cut back on several country-specific monitoring mechanisms, compromising one of the most powerful of human rights tools, that of naming and shaming.

This is happening, in part, because countries with vile human rights records -- Algeria, Burundi, China, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Kenya, Libya, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Vietnam -- command a powerful bloc within the CHR. They compose a near majority on the 53-member body. In 2003, Zimbabwe will joined them and, unless African countries reverse an earlier decision, Libya will chair this body for a year!

Such countries go out of their way to secure seats on the commission and then actively work to build alliances with pliable governments. In addition, they have developed a number of clever procedural ploys to undermine the commission.

Their resolve to render the commission toothless is not matched by a balancing impulse on the part of the traditional promoters of human rights in the West. To some extent, this is because -- all rhetoric notwithstanding -- human rights rank relatively low among these governments' priorities.

Trade often trumps human rights and governments, especially in Europe, are often loath to jeopardize lucrative contacts when governments that violate human rights retaliate at being criticized.

These tendencies have been compounded more recently by the war against terrorism. Western democracies are unwilling to irritate important allies in the counter-terrorism struggle simply because they might be violating the rights of their own citizens.

During the past year, for the first time in its history, the U.S. was not a member of the Commission (though it will be regaining its seat in 2003). You might think that America's absence contributed to the CHR's sorry state as, in the past, the U.S. was often principled and outspoken on some issues, in particular regarding certain specific abusive countries.

But you would be wrong. Increasingly obsessed at the prospect of its own citizens and practices coming under international scrutiny, America has over the past few years contributed to the general erosion of the UN human rights monitoring system. It adamantly opposed several important and promising new human rights initiatives, notably the International Criminal Court (ICC), and a new anti-torture mechanism.

On the anti-torture protocol, the U.S. sought to derail the creation of a universal system of visits to places of detention, under an optional protocol to the Convention Against Torture. Here America found itself allied with some strange bedfellows that it normally rebukes as chronic human rights violators -- Cuba, China, Iran, Libya, Sudan or Zimbabwe.

Yet, without U.S. support, the initiative was overwhelmingly endorsed in late July by the UN's Economic and Social Council.

Of course, not everything in the UN's human rights picture is uniformly bleak. The International Criminal Court will be beginning its work soon, and with greater international support than expected, thanks to America's efforts to undermine it. The universal system of visits to places of detention is gaining ground. Even at the CHR, there has been some recent progress, for example, on work to establish "disappearances" as an international crime.

Here, countries with fresh memories of repressive rule, such as Latin American and East European nations, have increasingly taken the lead in promoting human rights initiatives and defending the principles. (Latin America, in particular, played a pivotal role in all the situations described above.)

All the same, manipulation by powerful countries and the foes of human rights have left the CHR in bad shape. Vieira de Mello -- who has had a distinguished career in the UN system and is a brilliant diplomat -- must be willing and able to draw on his own region and on others to make sure that the UN human rights system serves the victims rather than the violators.

But he will also need to entice the West into becoming more pro-active and the U.S. in particular into re-establishing its role as a constructive rather than destructive force in human rights affairs.