By Jimmy Quinn
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
At the turn of this century, a number of United Nations
officials lined up to criticize the organization’s Commission on Human Rights.
Even the strongest advocates of the international
human-rights project were forced to admit the body’s abject failure: The
world’s worst dictatorships and human-rights abusers routinely manipulated its
proceedings to deflect from their own depravities. It became a tool with which
to attack Western governments and human-rights defenders.
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the legendary U.N. diplomat who
inspired an eponymous Netflix biopic, warned of its “use for political ends.”
Former secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali raised the alarm about its
manifest failings. Chief among them, he said, was “the double standards that
deprive the commission of any credibility.” “In some cases,” he added, “there
is concern about human rights violations, in other cases they are ignored.”
And so it was disbanded and replaced in 2006 with the
U.N. Human Rights Council. The council was supposed to be different. For
starters, it was founded with 47 members, six fewer than sat on the commission,
so that only a more selective group of countries could serve. The U.N.
resolution establishing the council also decreed that its members “shall uphold
the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights.”
A Playground for
Dictatorships
Needless to say, that hasn’t happened in the slightest.
During the 14 years of the council’s existence, its authoritarian members have
run the show. And after today’s elections to the council, many of them — China,
Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Cuba, among others — will re-join the world’s top
human-rights advocacy forum, despite their horrendous records on these issues.
It’s a stain on the U.N.’s reputation and a
disappointment that the council’s reputation is sullied by these countries and
their allies. Truth be told, the council can at times do important work and
fulfill its mandate to promote and protect human rights. It oversees a system
of U.N. rights experts that by-and-large do excellent work; in fact, this year,
close to 50 of them called for an investigation into the Chinese Communist
Party’s actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and elsewhere. And during its current
session, after U.N. experts released a report detailing the Maduro regime’s
“crimes against humanity,” the council held an urgent session on the situation
in Belarus.
On the other hand, Venezuela is a current member of the
council, with the right to vote on any of the body’s resolutions. The council
has also held a special debate on racism in the United States — which is
undoubtedly a problem, but one that should be addressed within a
liberal-democratic system, not by some of the most openly and deliberately
racist regimes in the world. And as the Western world prepares sanctions on the
Belarusian government’s crackdown, a Belarusian academic holds the post of special
rapporteur on “unilateral coercive measures” (which is to say sanctions).
She’s taken up the PR campaign, initiated by authoritarian countries decades
ago and accelerated recently, that claims Western sanctions targeting
human-rights abusers are the true human-rights abuses that the U.N. system must
combat.
And this — the merging of the authoritarian narrative
stream with concrete legal argumentation — is the most acute threat posed by
the U.N. Human Rights Council. At the UNHRC, what begins as narrative can
become the basis for political action. Nowhere is this clearer than in the
council’s longtime hostility toward sanctioning human-rights abusers. “Cuba is
extremely active at the Human Rights Council in adopting numerous resolutions
on behalf of dictatorships that seek to undermine the idea of individual human
rights, accountability, and to promote a narrative that the dictatorships, that
human rights abusers are victims of Western sanctions,” said Hillel Neuer, the
director of U.N. Watch, a non-governmental organization that tracks the
council’s activities, during a press conference on Friday.
The primary problem with the UNHRC sometimes appears to
be that it’s a farce of an organization, or a tragically missed opportunity to
promote human rights. But it has also inflicted great harm on the cause of
human-rights promotion.
Take the debate over sanctions. During negotiations on a
broad-ranging U.N. resolution on the international coronavirus response last
month, the Cuban delegation was at the last minute able to add a paragraph that
calls on member states to remove their sanctions. That — and a call for such a
measure by U.N. rights experts in June — demonstrates the wild success of the
efforts to delegitimize economic sanctions on the world stage.
The Chinese delegation has taken up this talking point,
too. When China presented a letter signed by 26 countries complaining of
alleged human-rights abuses committed by Western countries, it cited
that General Assembly resolution as one of these alleged rights violations
(Cuba was a signatory). In this way, statements build off of resolutions,
authoritarian-friendly expert posts lend legitimacy to these efforts, and all
of this opens the door to new resolutions and political outcomes favorable to
such regimes.
Along the way, these governments silence their critics in
Geneva, many of whom went to great lengths to share their story. “I personally
have been publicly interrupted, attacked, and even threatened by the
ambassadors of the dictatorship in coordination with the representatives of
other regimes, such as the Russian, the Chinese, or the Venezuelan, while
addressing the plenary session of the Human Rights Council,” said Rosa Maria
Paya, a Cuban dissident, during the Friday press conference. “All of these
regimes act in gangs, conspiring in packs to cover their backs and empty the
mission of the Human Rights Council of content and effectiveness.”
Uncontested Elections
Much of this is made possible by the council’s procedures
for these elections, which take place every year. About a third of the
council’s seats are allocated each October, and any U.N. member may run for
them — there’s no vetting process, no qualifications necessary. These seats are
allocated by region. In today’s election, there are four seats for Africa, four
more for Asia, three for Latin America, and two for Western Europe, and two for
Eastern Europe up for grabs.
With only slightly over a dozen seats up for election
each year, one would expect there to be more competition for them. Russia,
China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia are all widely known to hold in contempt the very
concept of political liberty, and each has left in its wake a trail of the
bodies of dissidents, journalists, political opponents, and religious and
ethnic minorities. In a race for a human-rights body where respect for human
rights was actually a qualification for candidacy, none of these countries
would qualify. In fact, many of the other countries running for seats today,
such as Uzbekistan and Pakistan, would also fail to clear that bar. An
analysis by U.N. Watch, the Human Rights Foundation, and the Raoul
Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights that examines the domestic human-rights
situation and U.N. voting records of the 16 candidates finds that only two of
them — France and the United Kingdom — are actually qualified to serve on the
council.
However, because election for UNHRC seats is split into
regional slates, the political maneuvering that takes place allows influential
but authoritarian governments to work their way onto the council. Although no
country is permitted to serve more than two consecutive terms on the Human
Rights Council, some foresight and planning goes a long way. China has been
absent from the council in 2020, but since 2006, it has sat on the council for four
terms.
As long as a country gets 97 votes in the General
Assembly, it can join the council. Most of the time, as is the case today,
regions will also run “clean slates,” where the number of candidates will match
the number of open seats. In today’s contest, only the Asian group has one more
candidate than the number of available seats. In the lead up to the election,
human-rights groups have led a campaign to convince countries to vote against
China and other human-rights abusers. Well-founded as this effort might be,
it’s not likely to have a significant impact on the final result. These
countries will still probably win seats.
When it comes to voting for the 47 countries tasked with
overseeing the U.N.’s response to human-rights violations, countries have
generally been impervious to moral sentiment and respect for human-rights. What
matters more are backdoor deals and political coercion. Understanding this, the
results are predictable.
So what are the prospects for change? Before the Trump
administration withdrew the United States from the body in 2018, U.S. officials
visited Geneva to resolve the council’s failings. In addition to seeking to
change a UNHRC standing agenda item that targets Israel, the administration
sought to make it easier to remove members of the council. Under the present
rules, suspending a council member “that commits gross and systematic
violations of human rights” requires a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly.
When negotiators came away from these talks empty-handed, the U.S. pulled out.
Neuer’s preferred reform to the council is a simple one:
Make every member of the General Assembly a member of the Human Rights Council.
That way, winning election to the Council can’t be held up as an accomplishment
as it currently is: “The moment after the election happens, you will see media in
all of the countries that I mentioned and other countries that have abused
human rights, you will see them proudly proclaiming how wonderful they are and
how the international community chose them to be on the highest human-rights
body.”
In an ideal world, any of these ideas might take root,
but an overhaul of the Human Rights Council is just not feasible in the present
political context. Too many countries have too much to lose. And even as
human-rights advocates continue to pan the Trump administration’s decision to
leave the body, European governments have gotten a free pass for their silence
on the current state of the body.
All of this speaks to one of the U.N. system’s
fundamental weaknesses. In order to get buy-in from countries around the world,
the organization is required to balance competing priorities, such as whether
to give everyone a say, or just specific countries. As the past several decades
of failures at the council and its predecessor, the commission, would suggest,
though, allowing any country to run for a seat without so much as a debate
about its qualifications has been disastrous.
Without considerable reform, the Human Rights Council,
and the international human-rights architecture with it, is likely to continue
down its perilous present path. Today’s election suggests that the council is
not any better than the commission that it replaced — and it might even be
worse.
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