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Thrusday February 9th / 2006
After months of discussion, the United Nations is close to finalizing a proposal for a much-improved Human Rights Council to replace its roundly discredited Human Rights Commission. Ideally, the U.N. General Assembly should create the new council before the current commission begins its yearly session next month, thus setting the tone for a new era. Creating a strong human-rights body not only will fulfill a fundamental U.N. mandate, but also show the United Nations' ability to reform itself and restore legitimacy eroded by ineffectiveness and scandal.
Gross violations
The proposed council could significantly improve upon the current commission system. It would meet year-round, including in emergency sessions to avert atrocities such as what we see today in Darfur, Sudan. Every U.N. member, no matter how powerful, would be subject to periodic human-rights reviews. Countries would be elected individually to the council by a secret vote of the General Assembly. In this vote, the General Assembly would be directed to consider the countries' human-rights records, including any ''systematic and gross violations'' and any U.N. imposed sanctions for human-rights abuses.
The aim, of course, is to prevent what largely has disabled the current U.N. Human Rights Commission: allowing the world's worst human-rights abusers -- China, Cuba, Russia, Sudan and Zimbabwe among them -- to sit at the table and deflect condemnation of their violations.
The last sticking point is a provision that would require any country to garner two-thirds of the votes of the General Assembly to become a council member. That two-thirds majority is indispensable if the council hopes to preserve credibility and banish serial human-rights violators.
Rights are universal
While the United States, Europe and other nations support the two-thirds-majority plan, many others do not, including 17 CARICOM nations and 53 nations in Africa. Some countries still think that, regardless of the human-rights record, a country approved by its regional peers should be able to sit on the council. That's the logic that brought discredit to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in the first place.
The crises generated by human-rights abusers inevitably spill over into their region. Thus, all countries stand to gain with a stronger U.N. monitor. High-ranking diplomats in the United States, Latin America, Europe and other countries must press for the strongest possible council. This is not about regional differences. Human rights are universal, as the United Nations declared in 1948.
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