The New UN Human Rights Council

OK, I'm back from my conference and a bit behind the news, but I wanted to mention an important development that occurred last week. US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton announced that the US will not seek a seat on the new human rights council as, according to Bolton, "[US] leverage in terms of the performance of the new council is greater by the US not running and sending the signal 'this is not business as usual' this year than if we were to run." The decision has been met with congressional criticism from both sides of the aisle as well as from human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which speculate that the decision reflects a fear that the US would not be able to receive a General Assembly majority (96 votes) to receive a seat on the council.

However, as noted in this memo from the Heritage Foundation and as I have previously argued, the council is deeply flawed. As noted in the memo:

The Failures of the Council

U.S. efforts to advance fundamental reform of the Human Rights Commission were blocked, and opponents of reform carried the day in the General Assembly. The final resolution creating the Human Rights Council contains many disappointing aspects:

• There are no criteria for membership on the Council. New members of the Council will be elected by a simple majority of the General Assembly. No state, no matter how poor its human rights record, is barred from membership—even states under Security Council sanction are not excluded. UN member states are simply instructed that a state’s human rights record should be “taken into account” when they vote for prospective Council members. Some UN member states have pledged to oppose human rights abusers seeking Council membership, but they are unlikely to have the votes necessary to block their election.
  
  
• The peer-review mechanism would not automatically affect eligibility for Council membership. While there is a periodic review requirement for Council members, the review is not tied to a mandatory outcome and there is no guarantee that even countries found complicit in massive and sustained human rights abuses would be censured. While there is a provision for suspending a Council member that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights, that step could be taken only with the agreement of two-thirds of the members of the General Assembly. Not even 50 percent of the General Assembly could agree that Sudan was guilty of human rights violations in November 2005; reaching this threshold would be near impossible.
  
  
• There is only a minimal reduction in membership from the old chr. Instead of a smaller, more streamlined body designed to attract the best members of each regional group, the resolution makes only a minimal reduction in membership, from 53 members to 47.
  
  
• The resolution significantly shifts the balance of power away from the Western regional group. The African and Asian groups will hold 55 percent of the votes. The proportional representation of the Asian group will see the greatest increase, and the Western European and Others Group (which includes the United States) the greatest decline. Indeed, the Western group absorbed half of the total reduction of 6 seats, despite that the group is composed mostly of free democracies that observe fundamental human rights and freedoms and support those policies abroad. The end result is to reduce the voice of countries likely to promote human rights.
  
  
• Special sessions of the Commission can be called by only one-third of the Council’s membership. Hailed as an improved capacity to deal with urgent human rights situations, the composition of the new Council will make it more likely that special sessions will be about the United States and Israel than about China or Sudan.
  
  
• The Council has a mandate to follow up goals and commitments “emanating from U.N. conferences and summits.” Many of these do not have universal support and lack legal standing.
  
  
• The resolution erodes the well-established standard of freedom of speech. A last-minute addition in response to the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Danish cartoons affair places an emphasis on roles and responsibilities rather than explicitly endorsing freedom of speech.

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As I see it, the question is: Should the US join a flawed institution for the sake of multilateralism and try to effect change from within, or stay out of the council all together? I agree with Bolton and the administration in preferring the latter option. The UN human rights bodies have been some of the most ineffective and embarrasing examples of the failures and inadequacies of international law and the new council proves to be no different. China, Cuba, and Iran have already announced their intentions to run for seats, and there is no reason to think that some, if not all, of them will be voted in.

Furthermore, as the New York Times article cited above mentions, the US plans to observe the council, especially who is voted on to it, for a year and will consider running for a seat then. This gives the council a chance to self-regulate by enforcing even a bare minimum of human rights standards as criteria for membership. If it cannot, it can be surmised that the US would choose to avoid the council entirely.

Now, or a year from now, is as good a time as any for the US to start moving away from the sovereign equality of the UN and begin building some meaningful components of international society. Creating a human rights body outside of the UN structure that can offer some real incentives to join and comply would be a step that would advance both US and international interests. Let's hope that Bush and Bolton use this opportunity to accomplish something important rather than as an example of the kind of "senseless unilateralism" that Max Boot warns against.