Articles on UN Reform...

(Coming from rather an American reformist angle but an interesting take on things...)

Thugocracies and the UN
January 31, 2006

United Nations Ambassador John Bolton is famously impatient about fixing the joint. He's got a list of proposals, about 750 of them. But right at the top is one that should be easy: Overhauling the UN Human Rights Commission.

This is the commission that is supposed to promote and protect human rights around the world. Instead, it has turned into an international punch line. It's the panel that, in a breathtaking 2003 pratfall, elected Libya to its chairmanship. Libya ranked among the most repressive countries on the planet, among such execrable company as North Korea and Sudan. So much for setting an example.

Since then, the commission has welcomed into its ranks such egregious human rights abusers as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Cuba. So instead of condemning the brutally repressive government of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or widespread rights abuses in Iran, the commission has been effectively muzzled, docile as a lapdog. It couldn't even bring itself to formally condemn the ethnic slaughter in Darfur in 2004. (Instead, it expressed "concern" while thousands of innocents died.)

"The reason highly abusive governments flock to the commission is to prevent condemnation of themselves and their kind, and most of the time they succeed," Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, told The New York Times. "If you're a thug, you want to be on the committee that tries to condemn thugs."

On a recent visit to the Tribune's editorial board, Bolton described the commission as "fundamentally broken."

He won't get an argument here--or in much of the world. Indeed, Bolton and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, famously at odds about a lot of things, completely agree that the commission needs to replaced.

Last spring, Annan proposed a new Human Rights Council, which would downsize and replace the 53-member commission. Notorious rights abusers would find it much harder if not impossible to join. The new panel would be far more nimble, able to respond to evidence of abuses immediately instead of waiting months for its annual meeting.

You'd think this would be easy to accomplish. But this is the UN. Nothing is easy.

Some poorer and less developed countries, notably Egypt and Pakistan, reportedly fear that the new council would become another instrument for wealthier and more powerful nations to meddle in their affairs. In other words, they want the ability to stack the panel with friendly nations to ensure that it doesn't get too serious about doing its job.

Talks on a new council stalled in December. Earlier this month, the U.S. renewed its push in New York and foreign capitals.

Bolton is refreshingly blunt. If a plan to create a strong council is defeated, he favors allowing the current commission to continue, as a sort of cautionary tale. "We want a butterfly," he said. "We're not going to put lipstick on a caterpillar and declare it a success."

The next meeting of the Human Rights Commission begins in March. The UN needs to act soon, to make sure that this meeting is its last.