Why the U.S. decision to rejoin the U.N.
Human Rights Council is self-defeating. By Anne Bayefsky
. This means that the United States
will soon be sitting down with Saudi Arabia,
Cuba, and China to talk
about human rights. Not human rights in Saudi
Arabia, Cuba,
and China,
mind you. But human rights in Israel
and the United States.
The Human Rights Council is the United Nations' lead human rights body.
Created in 2006 by the General Assembly as a "reformed" Human Rights
Commission, the council has taken the worst elements of its predecessor and
magnified them. Former U.S. President George W. Bush decided not to join it
after various U.S.-suggested reforms -- such as minimal standards of respect
for human rights among member states -- were rejected. Now, U.S. ambassador
to the United Nations, Susan Rice, claims that "working from within, we
can make the council a more effective forum." The U.S. State Department
speaks of future reform.
In other words, the United
States is joining a fundamentally flawed
body in order to make it something that it isn't. Disingenuous, to say the
least. The council already is the reform. Its predecessor lasted half a
century, and the same stumbling blocks that prevented fixing of the system in
2006 are still present and more entrenched than ever. The majority of the
members of the U.N. General Assembly are not fully free democracies.
Getting serious about democratic rights and freedoms is not their
priority.
The council itself is controlled by human rights abusers who like it just
the way it is. Membership is determined by distributing seats among five
regional groups, with the African and Asian groups holding the majority. In
turn, member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) hold a
majority in each of the African and Asian groups. This gives the OIC the
balance of power. When the going gets tough, the single U.S. vote, or
the seven votes of the "Western European and Others Group" (WEOG),
amount to a hill of beans. Resolutions are continually watered down for the
sake of artificial consensus or adopted over the objection of every WEOG
member. Just last week, we saw another sorry example of this phenomenon, with
the adoption of a resolution on the "defamation of religions." What
does restricting free speech in the name of "religion" have to do
with protecting individual human rights?
By letting some of the world's worst regimes rub shoulders with its leading
democracy, the United States
becomes an enabler. These governments don't share Western or universal values.
They use the council to: (1) feign interest in human rights, (2) keep the focus
on Israel
and away from themselves, (3) manufacture victim status, (4) encourage liberal
guilt and concomitant financial responsibility, and (5) undermine the universal
application of real human rights standards.
The record is incontrovertible. The council has passed more resolutions and
decisions condemning Israel
than all other 191 U.N. members combined. The council has one (of only
ten) formal agenda items dedicated to criticizing Israel. And one agenda item
to consider the human rights of the remaining 99.9 percent of the world's
population. There have been 10 regular sessions on human rights for all, and
five special sessions to condemn Israel alone. The council excludes
only Israel
from the key negotiating and information-sharing meetings of every regional
group. It has terminated human rights investigations on Belarus, Cuba,
Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
And all investigations of "consistent patterns of gross and reliably
attested violations of all human rights and all fundamental freedoms" in
such states as Iran, Kyrgyzstan, the Maldives,
Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan have
been "discontinued."
Absolutely none of that will change with the United States sitting in the front
row, Obama's rhetorical skills notwithstanding. On the contrary, joining this
farce means accepting the discriminatory agenda and attending WEOG meetings
with a sign reading "no representatives of the Jewish people allowed"
hanging on the door.
The Council's one new device -- the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) -- was
heralded as introducing a careful examination of all UN states without
discrimination. What actually happens is that a series of human-rights abusers
congratulate one another, avoid any serious scrutiny, and then denigrate the
democracies that agreed to the travesty in the first place.
Ironically, in the name of "engagement" the United States
will now repeatedly be drawn into confrontations that could have been avoided.
With Canada leaving the
council, the European Union spineless in the face of OIC opposition, and the
international human rights system now opposed to "naming and
shaming," the United
States will have to rock the boat if it
wants to avoid joining a corrupt consensus. This will mean voting
against OIC-driven resolutions and proposing "controversial"
condemnations of any state other than Israel.
President Obama has waded into quicksand, which will drown both U.S. efforts to
protect human rights and his sought-after reputation as their champion. Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Director of
the Touro College Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
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