The place where tyrants lecture the U.S. on human rights

Another example of why the UN is spiralling into irrelavence. - Sailor

Friday, February 11, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 a.m.

The place where tyrants lecture the U.S. on human rights

Collin Levey /Seattle Times editorial columnist


The new leadership of the United Nations Human Rights Commission calls to mind an old story. Told that the World Bank would be holding a conference on corruption in his country, a Cambodian official joked, "Why — to learn how to do it better?"

Recently elected to this year's Human Rights Commission "action panel" were Cuba and Zimbabwe. The regimes of two of the world's top rights-abusers — Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro — will now help decide which human-rights complaints will get a hearing at the U.N.

In just the past few years, Castro has drawn international sanction for a roundup of political dissidents, sending them to the island's famous prisons. Mugabe, among his charms, has also recently set out to ban foreign funding of human-rights workers — effectively banning NGOs from the country.

OK, you may be experiencing déjà vu. Such outrages are becoming old hat — the commission has long been speckled with rogue regimes. Libya was president of the panel a few years back, and Sudan is now serving out its third consecutive term, even as the United Nations debates whether what's going on in Sudan's Darfur province rises to the level of genocide or merely garden-variety state-sponsored mass murder.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's own team of experts concluded in a report last year that countries covet slots on the commission mainly as a way to shield their own derriéres — i.e., "Not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others."

No kidding. Nations that most flagrantly violate human rights typically vote as a bloc in favor of letting each other off the hook. In the most recent sessions, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Sudan, China, Egypt and Nigeria joined together reliably to exonerate whatever nation's government was accused of violations.

But lately there may be an added motive, even for countries with decent human-rights records: sticking a finger in America's eye.

Members are nominated by their neighbors in regional blocs. Cuba was Latin America's choice, Zimbabwe was Africa's and so on. But Cuba is virtually without significance in the world except as an icon of anti-Americanism. The only thing Castro has to peddle anymore is defiance of the gringos. And his Latin neighbors seem happy to buy — subsidizing him to give voice to anti-Yanqui sentiments that would be undiplomatic coming from their own mouths.

Sure, it would be preferable that the U.N., as the great multilateral voice, not confer its legitimacy on a process that gives tyrants the loudest voice on human rights. But contributing to such cynical choices by countries — like those in Latin America — that should know better is the fact everyone long ago gave up hope that the Human Rights Commission might play a serious role.

So what's to be done? In the recent report, the U.N. suggested one way to cure the sickness of the Human Rights Commission would be to expand it from its current 53 members to include the whole body of 191 countries. This gets it exactly backwards: The commission doesn't need more cacophony, but more clarity.
Why not follow the model of the World Trade Organization, where you don't get invited to join until you meet some minimum standards of openness to world trade and investment? Not all countries have a right to sit in judgment of their neighbors. Human Rights Watch has argued that at the very least, members of the commission should be required to have signed human-rights treaties, and have demonstrated some basic level of respect for the principle.

Freedom House, which scores countries according to political freedoms, last year noted that 13 members — a quarter of the commission — ranked as either "repressive" or "not free," representing the very bottom of the barrel worldwide. Reporters Without Borders has duly observed that nearly half — 25 — haven't even ratified the human-rights treaties they're supposedly charged with enforcing.

A simple fact of numbers at the United Nations is that the brutal and uncivilized countries of the world have the power to dominate discussions and prevent reform. That's because at the moment, U.N. membership bestows the same legitimacy on countries that live up to mankind's greatest ideals and those that make manifest the darkest horrors of human nature.

The United Nations has been looking for ideas for reform, so here's one: Scrap this horror of a "Human Rights Commission" and start a new group that's willing to acknowledge that not all countries are created equal — that's a right reserved to men.

Collin Levey writes Fridays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com