Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Why Dictators Will Win U.N. Human Rights Council Seats

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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