I have some concerns... :(

Well, it's now a couple of days on the other side of the Commission, so the dust has settled in my head, and I have some thoughts. Perhaps I should put them under subheadings! Hmm maybe I won't, I'll just see how they come out, and if they're completely garbled I'll try to reorganise. Stay with me.

First of all, before I came over here my perception was that it was primarily the United States pushing to 'undo' the Commission, and stall the creation of the Human Rights Council (HRC). I was fairly convinced that 'disengagement' would be the order of the day, particularly for the US.

Halfway through the internship I began to think maybe I'd been wrong. Even though they didn't support the Resolution in the General Assembly which created the HRC, neither did they block it, and in meetings after the Resolution was adopted, they made quite a few noises about wanting the HRC to be as strong as possible, and supporting it as much as they could. But I was chatting to the American Ambassador in the Plenary hall, when a journalist approached him for his views on the Council. He said something like, "well, I suppose everybody is hoping that it will be a strong body with some real capabilities for change, but frankly I am *seriously* sceptical". Now, this is not REALLY a surprise, but came as a bit of a reality check at this stage of the game. It was about 5 minutes after the closing of the Commission on Human Rights, and everyone in the room had just been discussing that we were all looking forward, into the future of the Council, stronger, brighter, better things ahead etc. But I sort of thought to myself, "hold on, what have we signed up for, here?!?". Everybody's been making positive noises about real reform in the council, but now that it's time for that reform to kick in, ALREADY States are pushing it to arm's length, dissociating, and tempering their expectations of what it can really achieve.

Particularly having listened to the to-ing and fro-ing about the Voting Standards for the Council, i have my own serious concerns. The view of the US, and a number of other countries, has been that the REASON that the UN Commission on Human Rights was a bit of a joke was that there have been states sitting in the Commission who have been Human Rights violators. The US has been OUTSPOKEN in its intention not to let such states have *any* part in the new Human Rights Council. Now, of course this in itself is massively problematic, because both Australia (asylum seekers, indigenous people) and the US (Guantanamo bay, Iraq etc..) have been heavily criticised as systematic violators of Human Rights. But of course, both of our countries are very keen for tenure on the Council. Hmmm. So that of course leads to the inevitable conclusion that somehow countries like ours are outside the jurisdictional striking range of the Commission, and then the Council. Which leads in to an even more interesting, and much more potentially disastrous, issue...

The general push has been to tighten the criteria for membership to the HRC so that those who are under sanctions or other heavy criticism pertaining to Human Rights are automatically excluded. So what will happen is that from its high-horse, the HRC will make high-faluttin' moral judgements over other countries, and expect them to jump into line with what the UN requires.

But the natural reaction of sovereign states when that happens is to distance themselves from the body, and denounce its jurisdiction! Just look at Ruddock when Australia was under fire from the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in 2000. Australia was heavily criticised for its treatment of asylum seekers and indigenous people, and generally given a right old slamming over the state of race relations in the country. Ruddock cracked it, made an utter shambles of himself in front of the Committee, personally insulted a number of people on that Committee, and then denounced the entire UN Treaty system!!! That denunciation has been Australia's official policy in the United Nations until only a couple of weeks ago, and is NOT a good state of play for this country in the context of international Human Rights Law.

And Downer's response was, "We won't cop it any longer! We are a democratically elected government in one of the most liberal and democratic countries you will find on Earth. And if a United Nations committee wants to play domestic politics here in Australia, then it will end up with a bloody nose."

Let's see what Mr Howard had to say: "I mean in the end we are not told what to do by anybody. We make our own moral judgments ... I'm not going to cop this country's human rights name being tarnished in the context of any domestic political argument ... Traditionally these matters are the prerogative of states."

This is exactly the attitude that will lead to the total discreditation of the Council, before it has even begun. And Australia is not alone- recently the US was requested by the UN to close Guantanamo Bay and try its detainees fairly and transparently. The US politely declined and basically told the UN to jump in the jurisdictional lake. So everyone is happy to listen to the UN, so long as it's not criticising them. Hmm.

So that's the first element of that problem. The second is this:

Why would ANY country who has been deliberately excluded from the HRC submit to its will? What reason could such a country possibly have to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a body which has openly, publicly pooh-poohed it? No reason whatsoever, I think. So I think perhaps the reform of the HRC has gone in polarly the opposite direction to that which it should have. I have become a firmer and steadily firmer believer in the principle of "universality" when it comes to Human Rights bodies.

Wouldn't the system work so much better if each and every country were welcomed into a forum of open discourse, accountability, criticism and pursuit of common goals? Why not ENGAGE potential problem states in the issue, rather than polarising it, and continuing the "us and them" mentality that has been so pervasive and so damaging up until now. Maybe this sounds a bit pie-in-the-sky to think that everyone could play nicely together, but I am VERY convinced that a system of alienation and proclamations from on-high will achieve, well... approximately squat.

Into all of this, inject the fact that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist... There are countries which are openly critical of the records of Australia and the US, and although sometimes those criticisms are dragged out as a form of grandstanding and to deflect attention away from other issues, both of our countries have done some pretty whack stuff in our times. Things that we shouldn't be proud of. Things which have caused immense suffering, and contravention of Geneva Conventions of all shapes and sizes (I'm thinking particularly here of the recent example of Amanda Vanstone admitting that yes, locking up refugee children IS, I suppose, a form of systematic, state-executed child abuse, but that it is justified by the policy outcomes it purportendly achieves. Gah.). So who are we to be pointing fingers while accepting no real accountability ourselves? It's a bit scary.

This is a bit half-baked but I'm late, and have to go. Please leave comments!

If you want to read more about the fun and games of Australia before the Treaty bodies, click here: http://www.safecom.org.au/geneva.htm Also, i know i've recommended Spencer Zifcak's book 'Mr Ruddock Goes to Geneva' 50 times already, but consider this number 51.