news News

UN, Human rights groups, Nobel peace laureates urge backing for New Rights Council
by AP / UN News / Human Rights Watch / Amnesty..
United Nations
5:38pm 10th Feb, 2006
 
1 March 2006
  
States should transcend national concerns to agree on Human Rights Council. (UN News)
  
Calling on Member States to transcend their national positions and forge global solutions, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson said today that it was crucial to get speedy agreement on setting up a new United Nations Human Rights Council, the body put forward to replace the much-criticized Human Rights Commission.
  
Mr. Eliasson, who is still consulting with Member States over the blueprint to set up the Human Rights Council, told reporters that he hoped to see it agreed upon “as soon as possible” and preferably before the Commission is due to open its annual session in a little under two weeks time.
  
“I would hope that we will all be able to move in this direction, and find that in a situation like this, the national positions have to be put in second place, and we now have to look for international solutions,” he said, adding that “on human rights, we need to be united in this world.”
  
“I have always said that I want to proceed as soon as possible. I have said earlier that the beginning of the work of the Human Rights Commission is a crucial date – the 13th of March…And as President of the General Assembly, I would also hope that we would move to action and have a consensus decision on this very crucial matter.”
  
Mr. Eliasson said that the blueprint for the Council, which he unveiled last Thursday, “constitutes the best basis for the continued work of human rights, which has to be maintained in the United Nations.”
  
“What is at stake is the establishment of a Human Rights Council within the body of the United Nations…The human rights dimension is the soul of the United Nations, and we have to preserve that very important element of our Organization,” he said.
  
Earlier this week, United States Ambassador John Bolton said that Washington opposed the proposed text.
  
That draft resolution modifies the original proposal put forward by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has called the draft “a solid basis to move forward,” while cautioning against “line-by-line negotiations” of the text.
  
“If at this stage we get into line-by-line negotiations or discussions, I am afraid it will lead to major delays and can cause a serious problem. I would appeal to Member States to understand that it is not a perfect world,” Mr. Annan told reporters on Monday, urging approval of the text.
  
Mr. Annan said that he hoped Member States would approve the proposal for the Council this week, “adding that the longer you let this sort of thing slide, the more precarious it gets.”
  
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has also called for speedy approval of the body, warning that failure by the General Assembly to do this could immeasurably damage the cause of human rights, and saying that there was no reason to believe that further negotiations would produce a better mechanism.
  
As envisioned in the blueprint that Mr. Eliasson unveiled last week, the Council will have a higher status and greater accountability than the Commission that meets yearly in Geneva.
  
Mr. Eliasson has also said that another major improvement of the proposed Council is the requirement that its members, elected individually by the Assembly, would be judged on their human rights records with the proviso that they can be suspended if they themselves commit gross and systematic violations.
  
Mr. Eliasson also said that the new Council would have a higher standing as a subsidiary body of the General Assembly, would meet year round as opposed to the six-week annual session of the Commission, and would conduct a “universal, periodic review” of all States’ adherence to human rights norms, starting by scrutinizing its members.
  
Concluding his comments to reporters today, Mr. Eliasson called for consensus on the Council, and again warned against further prolonged discussion.
  
“I have stated several times that I can see grave difficulties with renegotiation, and I can see grave difficulties with changing the text. And therefore I would hope that we would come to closure on this before the Human Rights Commission begins,” he said.
  
February 27, 2006 (Associated Press)
  
The United States has announced its opposition to the proposed new U.N. Human Rights Council on Monday, putting the U.S. administration on a collision course with many U.N. members, key human rights groups, and a dozen Nobel peace laureates.
  
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the United States will vote against the latest proposal for the council unless negotiations are reopened to address what it views as serious deficiencies, especially the chance that countries abusing human rights can become members.
  
UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson and Secretary-General Kofi Annan both indicated they want to see action on the draft resolution this week and no new negotiations.
  
At stake is whether the compromise proposal by Eliasson to revamp the widely criticized and highly politicized Human Rights Commission with a new Human Rights Council significantly improves the U.N."s human rights machinery.
  
Supporters - including Secretary-General Kofi Annan, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu - said it is a significant improvement and should be approved even though it doesn"t go as far as many of them wanted.
  
The Geneva-based Human Rights Commission has been attacked for allowing some of the worst-offending countries to use their membership to protect one another from condemnation or to criticize others. In recent years, commission members have included Sudan, Libya, Zimbabwe and Cuba.
  
A primary U.S. goal in the negotiations has been to ensure that human rights offenders are barred from membership on a new council. It wants a permanent body of 30 members chosen primarily for their commitment to human rights that would deal with major rights violations.
  
Under Eliasson"s proposal, the 53-member Human Rights Commission would be replaced by a 47-member Human Rights Council that would be elected by an absolute majority of the 191-member General Assembly - 96 members. The United States, Annan, and human rights campaigners wanted a two-thirds majority to try to keep countries abusing human rights off, but faced strong opposition, especially from developing countries.
  
The new draft does toughen the criteria for membership: Every member must “uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights" and have their human rights record reviewed during their three-year term. Eventually, all 191 U.N. member state would face such scrutiny.
  
The proposal also contains provisions to allow members of the new Human Rights Council to call special sessions to deal with human rights emergencies - and to suspend a member for "gross and systematic" rights violations.
  
Annan first proposed replacing the discredited commission in March 2005. At a U.N. summit in September, world leaders agreed, but left the details of the new council to the deeply divided General Assembly. After months of highly contentious negotiations, Eliasson presented his final proposal last Thursday and called for quick action - hopefully by consensus.
  
Bolton immediately expressed reservations and said the General Assembly should consider the possibility of reopening negotiations between nations - not using a “facilitator” like Eliasson. But Eliasson, Annan, human rights groups and many diplomats warned that reopening the text would almost certainly weaken it.
  
27 February 2006
  
Human Rights Hypocrisy, by Marjorie Cohn. (Truth Out - Perspective)
  
Last week, the President of the United Nations General Assembly announced a new proposal to revamp the UN Human Rights Commission and rename it the UN Human Rights Council. The product of months of negotiations between the 53 member nations of the Commission, the proposal will be voted on by the General Assembly next month. The United States, however, immediately denounced the compromise. John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations, said it has too many "deficiencies" and should be renegotiated.
  
Bolton stated last month, "Membership on the Commission by some of the world"s most notorious human rights abusers mocks the legitimacy of the Commission and the United Nations itself." But Bolton was not referring to the United States, which invaded Iraq in violation of the UN Charter, killed thousands of innocent Iraqis, and tortured and abused prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.
  
The United States and Western European countries have criticized the Human Rights Commission because it has elected countries such as Sudan, Zimbabwe, Libya and Cuba, whom the Western nations have accused of human rights violations.
  
In a press release issued last week, the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations said, "If any government does not deserve to be part of the Council, it is the one who represents a State that benefited from the slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, that kept a "constructive commitment" to extend the existence of the apartheid regime, that protects and bestows impunity to the human rights violations perpetrated by the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other Arab territories, that supported the bloody military dictatorships of Latin America, that today tortures and murders in the name of liberty which the majority of its own citizens do not benefit from, that fails to meet its commitments and obligations of official development assistance to the Third World, and that threatens and attacks the Southern countries."
  
The United States objects to the new proposal"s commitment to the protection of economic, social and cultural rights. The refusal to enshrine rights such as employment, education, food, housing, and health care in US law is the reason the United States has not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Since the Reagan administration, there has been a policy to define human rights in terms of civil and political rights, but to dismiss economic, social and cultural rights as akin to social welfare, or socialism.
  
Indeed, the United States" inhumane policy toward Cuba exemplifies this dichotomy. The US government criticizes civil and political rights in Cuba while disregarding Cubans" superior access to universal housing, health care, education and public accommodations and its guarantee of paid maternity leave and equal pay rates.
  
The US also opposes the new proposal"s affirmation that the right to development is on par with the rights to peace and security, and human rights, as the three pillars of the United Nations system. Last year, the United States and Australia were the only nations to vote against a General Assembly resolution on the Right to Development, which was passed by a vote of 48 to 2, with 2 abstentions. It reaffirmed the principle that the right to development is an "inalienable human right."
  
A member of the Commission since it was formed in 1947, the US was furious when it was voted off the Commission in 2001. Many countries were angry with the United States for its policies in the Middle East, and its opposition to the International Criminal Court, the treaty to ban land mines, the Kyoto Protocol, and making AIDS drugs available to everyone.
  
It was only after behind the scenes negotiations among Western nations that the US was able to manipulate its way back onto the Commission one year later.
  
The new proposal provides that members of the Council will serve for a period of three years and shall not be eligible for immediate re-election after two consecutive terms. This is objectionable to the United States, which wants to guarantee a spot on the Council for the five permanent members of the Security Council - France, Britain, Russia, China and the US.
  
The United States also wants open voting on Council membership instead of the secret ballot elections that the proposal calls for. The US would like to make it easier to blackmail smaller nations for their votes.
  
In his statement last week, Bolton also said, "We consider the United States a champion of human rights. It is a fundamental and bedrock tenet upon which our country was founded. Thus, when the United States falls short of the high standards we set for ourselves, we move swiftly and decisively to vigorously prosecute offenders who are US citizens in our courts." Yet only a few low-ranking soldiers and a chief warrant officer have been prosecuted for the widespread and systematic torture and abuse of prisoners in US custody.
  
Ironically, two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Commission issued a report decrying the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners by United States forces at Guantánamo. It called on the US government to ensure that "all persons found to have perpetrated, ordered, tolerated or condoned such practices, up to the highest level of military and political command, are brought to justice." The United States, which has refused to allow UN or other human rights experts to speak directly with the Guantánamo prisoners, rejected the Commission"s report.
  
The US has a history of scuttling Commission investigations when they focus on the United States as a human rights violator.
  
Last spring, the United States refused a request by Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission"s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, to meet with State Department officials to discuss the impact the US embargo on Cuba was having on the Cuban people"s right to food. Last fall, Ziegler reported that both Coalition Forces and the insurgents in Iraq "have adopted the cutting of food and water supplies to cities under attack." Ziegler noted that "the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited in both international and non-international armed conflict," citing the Protocols to the Geneva Conventions.
  
The United States likewise pressured the Commission to withdraw Professor Cherif Bassiouni, the Commission"s Independent Expert on Human Rights in Afghanistan, from his mission after he issued a report critical of the US. Professor Bassiouni accused United States troops of breaking into homes, arbitrarily arresting residents and torturing detainees. He said "When these forces directly engage in practices that violate ... international human rights and international humanitarian law, they undermine the national project of establishing a legal basis for the use of force."
  
"The United States and the coalition forces consider themselves above and beyond the reach of the law," Professor Bassiouni told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! "They feel that human rights don"t apply to them, the international conventions don"t apply to them, nobody can ask them what they"re doing, and nobody can hold them accountable."
  
Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh concurs. He wrote, "In the cathedral of human rights, the US is more like a flying buttress than a pillar - choosing to stand outside the international structure supporting the international human rights system but without being willing to subject its own conduct to the scrutiny of the system."
  
The composition of the new Council will not likely differ significantly from the old Commission. "That reality," according to Phyllis Bennis, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, "reflects the failure of the John Bolton-led US 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."
  
In the next few weeks, we can expect some strong arm-twisting by the United States to scuttle the new proposal.
  
(Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the US representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists).
  
February 24 , 2006
  
Amnesty International calls on all governments to adopt without delay the draft resolution on the Human Rights Council presented on 23 February by the President of the General Assembly as the first concrete step in meeting the 2005 World Summit’s commitment to strengthen the United Nations" Human Rights machinery.
  
The draft resolution released on 23 February will establish a Council with a clear mandate to address all human rights situations, a more frequent meeting schedule that allows it to react more effectively to both chronic and urgent situations, and a new universal review mechanism to ensure that all countries" human rights records are addressed periodically. Moreover, the resolution establishes an election procedure which, if taken seriously by UN member states, can give the Council a membership more committed to the promotion and protection of human rights than the Commission on Human Rights in recent years. The text also preserves key strengths of the Commission, including its unique system of independent experts known as "Special Procedures" and its practices of NGO participation.
  
Make it a reality
  
Ask your government to support the draft resolution on the Human Rights Council presented on 23 February by the President of the General Assembly by writing to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in your country. Although the Council to be established by the resolution will be weaker than hoped, because of many governments" failures to follow through on their stated commitment to human rights, Amnesty International considers that the President of the General Assembly’s text provides a sound basis on which to create a better body than the Commission on Human Rights, and that it must not be diluted further.
  
Following the adoption of the resolution, the first priority of the international community should be to elect a Council membership committed to upholding the highest human rights standards.
  
February 24, 2006
  
Global Rights urges UN Memebership to Adopt Draft Resolution for a New Human Rights Council.
  
Reform of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights is greatly needed and the draft proposal issued yesterday by the President of the General Assembly on the establishment of new Human Rights Council is a vital step in the right direction and should be adopted promptly. We strongly urge the United States Administration to get behind the resolution.
  
While this proposal is a compromise, it is one that will advance efforts to improve the effectiveness of the primary organ of the UN charged with protecting human rights. Together with our colleagues in the human rights community, Global Rights believes that elements of the proposal are a substantive improvement over the current situation and will serve as a useful platform for moving forward.
  
Opposing it, or seeking to amend it at this juncture, will likely enable the spoiler states to weaken the resolution with numerous amendments, or to delay its adoption indefinitely. No resolution, and no new Council, would leave only the discredited Commission in place, and risks further weakening of the UN’s human rights machinery, a result that would reward only the worst abusers.
  
Global Rights agrees with Kofi Annan, that, “member states have had enough time to discuss the issues and now is the time for decision.”
  
February 23, 2006
  
U.N.: Governments Must Back New Rights Council. (Human Rights Watch)
  
Governments should swiftly approve a draft resolution to create a new United Nations Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch said today. Although the text presented today by Jan Eliasson, president of the General Assembly, falls short of the vision that Secretary-General Kofi Annan set out in his reform report of last year, governments should approve the resolution without watering it down. The U.N.’s ability to protect human rights – and its credibility – will depend on governments’ willingness to make the council a strong and effective body.
  
“The proposed new council is better than the old, discredited Commission on Human Rights but it is less than we had hoped for,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “The burden is now on the governments of the world to upgrade the council’s membership so it has a better chance of meaningfully protecting human rights.”
  
Human Rights Watch expressed particular disappointment that the text dropped the requirement for members of the new council to be elected by a two-thirds majority of U.N. member states, as this would have created a high obstacle to the election of the worst abuser states to the new body. However, the heated negotiations about excluding the most serious violators have focused attention on the human rights records of candidates to the new council. “We hope the intense focus on membership will change the political culture of the council, so that membership is seen as a privilege, not a right, that depends on proven respect for human rights,” said Roth.
  
Human Rights Watch warned against further delay in creating a Human Rights Council. “Given the death-by-a-thousand-cuts tactics of abusive governments during these deliberations, there is no reason to believe that more negotiations will yield improvement,” said Roth. “Walking away will do nothing for those who need the U.N.’s protection. The moral high ground is achieved by staying and fighting to make the council as effective as possible.”
  
In his March 2005 report “In Larger Freedom,” Secretary-General Annan proposed replacing the Commission on Human Rights with a smaller standing body that would meet throughout the year. In his view, members would be expected to abide by the highest human rights standards, and their election would require a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly. In September 2005, heads of governments and states from all over the world mandated the U.N. General Assembly to establish a Human Rights Council that would “strengthen” the U.N.’s response to human rights violations.
  
The key elements of the draft resolution are:
  
* The council will meet at least three times a year for ten weeks – an improvement on the commission’s single annual six-week meeting – with a right for one-third of the council members to call additional sessions “when needed.”
  
* The proposal that members of the Human Rights Council be elected by a two-thirds majority of General Assembly member states was dropped under pressure from governments in favor of election by an absolute majority of member states. However, the resolution introduces for the first time the idea – seemingly intuitive but never before officially pronounced – that governments voting for Council members should consider the candidates’ human rights records, pledges, and commitments. If General Assembly members are guided by this admonition, it would allow supporters of human rights to discourage and sometimes defeat the candidacy of abusive governments.
  
* The resolution would permit the General Assembly to suspend any member of the Human Rights Council that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights.
  
* The old commission’s system of independent “special rapporteurs” and other special procedures, which is one of the great strengths of the U.N. human rights system, will be retained, as will the tradition of access for human rights NGOs. However, the special procedures will be subject to review within one year, so member states must be vigilant to ensure they are maintained.
  
* Members of the council are committed to cooperate with the council and its various mechanisms – an improvement on current practice, in which some members of the commission refuse to grant unimpeded access to U.N. human rights investigators.
  
* The right of the council to address serious human rights situations through country-specific resolutions is reaffirmed.
  
* A new universal review procedure will scrutinize the records of even the most powerful countries – an important step toward redressing the double standards that the commission was often accused of applying.
  
Human Rights Watch calls on all member states of the United Nations to:
  
* Work to elect the best possible candidate countries from each region of the world, including by insisting that the regional groups present their nominations to the council at least thirty days prior to election, to allow for public scrutiny of their human rights records and pledges.
  
* Ensure that the sessions dedicated to universal peer review come in addition to the minimum three sessions and ten weeks now specified in the resolution.
  
* Work with the new council to develop an effective, robust universal review procedure that will provide neutral, objective scrutiny of the human rights records of all countries in the world, and culminate in appropriate conclusions and recommendations.
  
“The moral authority of the U.N. depends on its ability to respond effectively and quickly to the plight of human rights victims around the world,” said Roth. “The current resolution is less than ideal, but it can be made to work if the governments of the world show the necessary commitment. The ball is in their court.”
  
February 23, 2006
  
The Universal Rights Network supports calls for the swift approval of the draft resolution to create a new United Nations Human Rights Council. As re-opening discussions of the text threatens to undermine the important gains that have been achieved and further weaken the agreed text.
  
Kim Gleeson, Executive Director

 
Next (more recent) news item
Next (older) news item