UNITED NATIONS, New York: UN officials have decided they must act within weeks to produce an alternative to the widely discredited Human Rights Commission to maintain hope of redeeming the UN's credibility in 2006. The commission, based in Geneva, has been a persistent embarrassment to the United Nations because participation has been open to countries like Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe, current members who are themselves accused of gross rights abuses. Libya held the panel's chairmanship in 2003."The reason highly abusive governments flock to the commission is to prevent condemnation of themselves and their kind," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, "and most of the time they succeed. If you're a thug, you want to be on the committee that tries to condemn thugs."
| This logic escaped Kofi for a while, didn't it? |
But, he said, the rights commission has taken center stage. "For the great global public, the performance or nonperformance of the Human Rights Commission has become the litmus test of UN renewal," he said. "We can't overestimate getting a clear win on this in January."
Annan begins his
Negotiators have been struggling for months over the terms of a new Human Rights Council that Annan proposed last spring to replace the commission. A hoped-for agreement in December did not materialize.
| Perhaps because the thugs prevented it? |
The current commission has 53 members serving staggered three-year terms and elected from closed slates put forward by regional groups. It meets each year in Geneva for six weeks. The proposed council would exist year-round, be free to act when rights violations are discovered, conduct periodic reviews of every country's human rights performance and meet more frequently throughout the year.
Still in dispute are the council's size, the procedures for citing individual countries, how often the panel would meet, a possible two-term limit for membership and whether members would be chosen based on agreed criteria of human rights performance or by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly as a way of weeding out notorious rights violators.
| If a performance clause isn't included it will be clear that this is all for show. |
As with most of the changes being proposed, the rights council has drawn suspicion from the poorer and less developed countries of the 191-member General Assembly.
| Most of whom, purely a coincidence, are run by thugs. |
| First, the latter; if that fails, the former. |
UN diplomats singled out Egypt and Pakistan as countries that were leading the resistance to the proposed council.
| As we were just saying about thugs ... |
The commission had been undermined, he contended, by allowing participation of countries whose purpose was "not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others."
"As a result," Annan said, "a credibility deficit has developed, which casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole."
Roth of Human Rights Watch was more blunt. "If the governments of the world cannot get together on human rights at the UN, then it is a shameful act for the entire organization," he said.
| HRW ges one right, finally. |
| And Zimbabwe, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, the Congo, North Korea ... |
The 15-nation UN Security Council weighed its response yesterday to a UN investigation that accused Syria of hindering its probe into the slaying of former Lebanese Prime Minister 
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Even US ambassador John Danforth said he had "great confidence" in Mr Annan although he repeated the White House view that no one could make a definitive judgment until all the facts were in from investigations into allegations of corruption in the $64 billion program. During a working luncheon of the 15-nation council, Mr Annan expressed his determination to "carry out the investigation and to make the facts known to everybody," said Algerian ambassador