UNdefended Human Rights

In the Fall of 1984, former Austrian United Nations Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, lamented that the U.N. had not yet managed to cut through the political habits and attitudes of earlier less hurried centuries to come to grips decisively with emerging factors, despite much effort and undoubted sincerity.

Twenty five years later, the U.N. continues to grapple with these issues and more so within one of its most paramount bodies—the U.N. Human Rights Council.

On Tuesday, May 12, 2009, the U.S. won its first seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, with the hope of improving the Council’s tarnished image. Critics and pundits alike exude low optimism that a U.S. presence will enhance the body’s reputation. The Council has been accused of malpractices such as turning a blind eye to human rights violations by China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia among other states.

The U.N. Human Rights Council came into existence in 2006 to replace the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, whose character had fallen so far, that even the then U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan admitted that, “the Commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations as a whole.”

At the Council’s re-launch, a former U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, called upon the Council to rededicate itself to the “scaffolding of human rights” expressed by former President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Council’s main aim is to promote and protect human rights. However, as critics point out, the past three years have shown little evidence of the Council’s determination to pursue this goal. One case in point as Brett Schaefer, a public policy analyst at conservative U.S. think tank, the Heritage Foundation, argues, “the Council’s continued biased focus on Israel to the detriment of a balanced approach to the Palestinian-Israeli situation.”

Another major factor that has contributed to the ineffectiveness of the Council is its voting patterns, which are divided into geographical regions and allow for little competition. In the recent voting, New Zealand gave way to the U.S. leaving only three countries competing for the three available seats in the Western bloc. This, according to former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, suggests that states that care about human rights simply don’t care enough.

U.N. Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, expressed optimism that U.S. membership would help reign in some of the Council’s members that are known for notorious abuse of human rights.

Whether a U.S. presence will bring the much needed change in the Council’s operations is a question only time can answer.

Emily Kanyi is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.