The UN Human Rights Commission is to be abolished and the Human Rights Council is to take its place, writes Marian Houk in Geneva A dramatic decision at the United Nations on how to tackle abuses of human rights was presented as an attempt to begin a real change in the international organisation. But, could the proposal -- to abolish the present UN Human Rights Commission, whose first chairperson, in 1946, was United States First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and replace it with a UN Human Rights Council -- mean change only for the sake of change? UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told journalists in New York last week that the proposed change would be "more than cosmetic". This was a subtle retort to US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, who has amused onlookers by saying that he wanted "a butterfly, not a caterpillar wearing lipstick that would be called a success". This is actually a rather funny remark -- at least to Americans -- instantly calling to mind a strong visual cartoon-like image, but it is also surprisingly sexist. (Couldn't Ambassador Bolton have said, instead: "not a caterpillar using hair gel", for example? Or, "not a caterpillar with a mustache"?) The UN secretary-general's cool irritation with the US ambassador to the UN is obvious. It has not been reciprocated recently, at least not publicly, in a remarkable display of discipline on the US side, following the publication of the damaging conclusions of the Paul Volcker investigation into the UN's Oil-For-Food Programme. Kofi Annan still tells journalists that Ambassador Bolton is new to the UN, and the secretary-general points out that he talks directly to Bolton's bosses in Washington (Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and US President George W Bush). In any case, when UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson of Sweden presented his compromise text on creating a new Human Rights Council, the proposal was supported by UN Secretary-General Annan, and seconded by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, as well as by the most important international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in the field of human rights. Grouching after the compromise text was presented about Eliasson's eight-month negotiating effort (assisted by Ambassador Kumalo of South Africa and Ambassador Arias of Panama), Ambassador Bolton observed that the whole process could still be re-opened -- a comment greeted with groans at the prospect of more of those intensive discussions of a kind that only a diplomat could enjoy. Over the weekend, neo- conservative commentators clamored that a less-than-great deal would be difficult to undo. On Monday, Ambassador Bolton said he had instructions to re-open the negotiations. In the General Assembly, a US vote against the proposal could, of course, still permit the measure to pass.Nobody knows yet what will happen, just days before the 62nd annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission is scheduled to begin on 13 March in Geneva. If the proposal is adopted, nobody is quite sure, either, what such a decision will actually mean. A great number of details remain to be worked out.Dr Vincent Chertail, director of research at the (University of) Geneva's University Centre for International Humanitarian Law, said that his general impression is that "this ambitious reform will be actually quite limited in practical effect -- though I do hope to be proved wrong." Dr Chertail said that in his view, the main flaw in this move to reform is the absence of any provision to make the future decisions of the proposed Human Rights Council binding. By contrast, Dr Chertail noted, the European Court of Human Rights has a much greater impact; as a result of its rulings: "states parties do change their national legislation, which is not the case with the Human Rights Commission, nor is this envisaged for the Human Rights Council." The very name -- Human Rights Council -- reflects the earlier desire to have the proposed new body function almost as powerfully as the UN Security Council, which can adopt measures binding on all 191 UN member states, and where its five permanent members (the US, the Russian Federation, China, Britain, and France) also have the right to veto any proposed resolution. These same permanent five members squashed, last year, one of Kofi Annan's other major UN reform proposals -- to enlarge the UN Security Council. However, at the moment the UN is experiencing the backlash, in a determined resistance by developing or Non-Aligned states who wish to privilege the much more universally representative, and therefore more "democratic", UN General Assembly. One of the main ideas of the proposed Human Rights Council seems to be the exclusion of any human rights violators. This made it relatively easy to drop an initial proposal to reserve a special status for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. In the propaganda wars, the Human Rights Commission is denounced for including not only China and Cuba, but also Saudi Arabia (just elected for the 2006 commission meeting as Regional Coordinator for the Asian Group) as well as Sudan, and now Zimbabwe and Venezuela -- and previously, Libya. Libya, of course, is no longer regarded as a "rogue state" after Muammar Gaddafi gave up Libya's nuclear weapons development programme. This makes even more apparent the gross unfairness of blaming the failings of the Human Rights Commission on its election as president, three years ago, of the then ambassador of Libya, Najat Al-Hajjaji. In fact, Ambassador Al-Hajjaji was elected for her demonstrated personal qualities and capabilities, observable in her earlier work as one of several appointed vice chairpersons of the Human Rights Commission in 2001. After her election as the commission's 2003 president, however, she was personally targeted not just for representing Libya but also for having been formerly married to a nephew of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. It is hard to see exactly why this should be given as one of the main reasons the Human Rights Commission is so "discredited", as even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said. The denunciation campaign against Ambassador Al-Hajjaji smacks of guilt-by-association -- itself a human rights violation. It does not at all reflect Ambassador Al-Hajjaji's real status as a divorced working mother trying hard to raise a then-teenage daughter while working non-stop in a high- profile position of international responsibility. Every decision that Ambassador Al-Hajjaji took was, in fact, guided by expert advice from the veteran international staff of the UN Human Rights Secretariat. Nothing in her conduct of the commission reflected any encouragement or endorsement of human rights violations, and the decisions taken by the commission reflected not only its composition but also the international climate. Ambassador Al-Hajjaji was only the fifth woman elected president of the Human Rights Commission since it began work in 1946. One of the supposed major virtues of the new proposal is that the members of the new Human Rights Council will have to be each elected individually, one by one, by the UN General Assembly. That will eliminate the previous practice of approving the slates of candidates agreed upon within the UN's regional groups. Instead of the present system of "regional representation", it is explained, there will be a new programme of "geographical distribution". One of the major sticking points in negotiations was whether the members of the proposed Human Rights Council would have to be elected by two-thirds of the UN General Assembly, or by a simple (now being called an "absolute") majority -- 50 per cent of those present and voting, plus one. The secretary-general proposed the former, and was backed by the US. The developing or Non-Aligned countries backed the latter -- saying that (although they represent over 130 of the UN's 191 member states), they could not count on winning two-thirds of the votes in the General Assembly; their expert vote estimators calculate that only the US and some of its allies could be sure of getting that number. Another change: instead of having 53 members, as the Human Rights Commission has at present, the new Human Rights Council will have only 47. The proposed Human Rights Council is to have 13 member states from Africa (-2), 13 from Asia (+1), six from Eastern Europe (+1), eight from Latin America and the Caribbean (-3) and seven from "Western Europe and Other States" (-3) -- which includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Korea, and Israel. Instead of meeting in one grueling six-week annual session, there will be at least three shorter sessions, totaling at least 10 weeks, throughout the year, plus other special sessions as agreed. Of course, this is a more expensive proposition -- and there is no concrete idea, yet, of where the money will come from. The UN budget planning is a cumbersome bureaucratic process, and this year's spending was worked out at least four years ago. NGO participation will continue in the new Human Rights Council. NGOs must, in any case, first be vetted and obtain formal authorisation by governments voting in the UN's Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) -- a process that itself is highly political, during which governments can raise objections to certain NGOs. Governments have also worked out, of course, that creating their own NGO backers -- known in the trade as GONGOs, or government-organised NGOs -- would be another clever way to deal with the problem. "So, in our midst, we also have fake NGOs," Mariette Grange, head of the Human Rights Watch in Geneva, explained. She confirmed that she had personally witnessed, in meetings in Geneva, threats made by these government- sponsored groups, against true human rights defenders. Human Rights Watch is, she said, "very much aware that the [proposed draft] text is a negotiated text...and a compromise". Nevertheless, she said, it contains qualitative improvements. "The effect of the peer review of human rights should not be underestimated," she explained, because the present Human Rights Commission has no mandate to look at member states in a systematic manner; the new system would therefore have "more credibility". In 2004, the country most criticised in the Human Rights Commission was Israel, according to calculations by the Hudson Institute and the Touro Law Centre Institute For Human Rights in the US; Sudan came in second; Democratic Republic of Congo was third; and Côte d'Ivoire tied the US for fourth place.
