A UN General Assembly vote on establishing
the new Human Rights Council is a fairly
devastating comment on current US global prestige
as well as the effectiveness of diplomacy as
practiced by US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.
The vote to replace the largely
discredited Commission on Human Rights with the
new council was 170-4, with the United States,
Israel, the Marshall Islands
and Palau voting against the resolution and with
three abstentions.
While the US has said much
about the human-rights behavior of many UN member
states, there is a strong feeling that Washington
and its ambassador do not really have the moral
standing to hector others.
The
three nations the US led in opposing the new
council are probably the top per capita recipients
of US cash - along with the Federated States of
Micronesia, which even Bolton couldn't bully
enough.
The Marshall Islands and Palau,
micro-states in the Pacific, depend upon the US
Congress for their entire budgets. There is an
additional irony. For many decades the United
States stalled in allowing the former trustee
territory of Palau its independence until it
dropped clauses in its constitution preventing the
US from bringing nuclear weapons in to defend it.
Residents of the Marshall Islands are still trying
to get compensation for the time they spent as
human guinea pigs during the days of nuclear
testing on their atolls.
And of course
Israel owes a lot of vetoes to the US.
Most United Nations member states
recognized that despite the many compromises,
General Assembly president Jan Eliasson and
Secretary General Kofi Annan pulled together what
could be an effective and workable Human Rights
Council - despite the Bolton blusterings.
One of their most effective pieces of
diplomacy was persuading Cuba not only to drop its
proposed amendments but to vote for the
resolution. It may be that one their most potent
weapons was the shame and ignominy that Havana
would have felt in joining Washington in a "no"
vote.
As for the three abstentions, it's
unlikely Venezuela, Belarus and Iran could be
considered part of the US administration's dream
team. Ironically, they might have voted against
the resolution except for their revulsion at
putting up their hands alongside the US and
Israel.
Bolton's grandstanding played well
for domestic audiences - but got nowhere with the
rest of the world, not least because the rest of
the world had its own sources for what had
happened in negotiations and did not rely on
Bolton and the US State Department for details.
For example, many diplomats at the UN feel
that if the US delegation had actively and
constructively participated in negotiations
instead of posturing for domestic constituencies,
then the electoral requirement for a two-thirds
majority for new members to the council would have
passed.
However, although Bolton later
jumped on the bandwagon of Annan's proposal for a
two-thirds majority vote for future members, it
was only after it had disappeared in the course of
negotiations. And he was almost certainly quite
pleased.
But Bolton was very reserved on
the proposed two-term limits for council members
and indicated initially that he would have
preferred a permanent seat for the United States,
even if it entailed one also going to China,
hardly a paragon of human rights.
The US
has lost votes at the old Human Rights Commission
- that was before the administration of President
George W Bush added "Guantanamo", "Abu Ghraib" and
"renditions" (whereby suspected terrorists are
taken into US custody but delivered to a
third-party state) to the world's human-rights
vocabulary and when it was a simple majority.
The United States' diplomatic approach to
human rights is, in its own way, every bit as
partisan and partial as some of the notorious
human-rights offenders who have conspired to
emasculate the Human Rights Commission over the
years.
Indeed, the best weapon the axis of
offenders in the old commission had was the United
States' attitude, which, for example, condoned,
trained and financed some of the worst
human-rights offenders of the era in Central
America while fulminating against Cuba's much less
serious, although not negligible, offenses.
Disagreement with the US should not necessarily
put a country in the dock for human-rights
offenses - although neither should opposing the US
allow an exemption.
It did not help that
one of the last reports of the now-condemned Human
Rights Commission was on the Guantanamo Bay
detention facility in Cuba, in which the experts
roundly condemned the United States' breaches of
international law. Though their conclusions were
not that different from the US Supreme Court's,
that the internees had legal rights and should
have access to the courts, the Bush administration
and its supporters attacked the report in terms
that could have been borrowed from a riposte by
Cuba, Uzbekistan or Syria.
The new council
has addressed the genuine concerns of many members
by adopting the principle of "universality" in a
constructive way, instead of the usual blocking
context in which it is used at the UN. All
members' human-rights records will come under
scrutiny. The axis of offenders' main purpose in
getting on the former commission was to block
consideration of their own cases, so this removes
much of the incentive for them to be on the
council.
Indeed, since the members of the
council may well be the first to be scrutinized,
there may well be an actual disincentive, not
least because many delegations have promised a
thorough scrutiny of the credentials of
candidates.
Countries that are genuinely
concerned about human rights need to eschew their
usual cozy rotas and regional voting pacts, but we
can be sure that the human-rights non-governmental
organizations will keep their feet to the fire.
And as for the US, it would be good if it voted on
the basis the State Department's own annual Human
Rights Reports, which has managed to be critical
even of allies.
Ironically, the states
that will run for election to the new council in
the next few months will be praying above all that
the US does not publicly support their
candidacies. It would be a fatal embrace.
One must assume that the scale of the US
defeat in the vote may have taken some of the
bounce out of Bolton, and certainly the State
Department rapidly announced that the US would be
constructively engaged in the council and its
work. The US neither invented human rights, nor
does it now have them under trademark protection.
Along with the "Responsibility to Protect"
report (which was adopted last year and looks at
when it is appropriate to intervene when the
citizens of a state are at risk), the Human Rights
Council is a big step forward for the United
Nations and a worthy testimonial to Annan's second
term. However, far from rewards by the US
Congress, watch out for attacks for the world's
temerity in disagreeing with Bolton.
Ian Williams is author of
Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families,
Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.
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standing to hector others. 
