Don't
Lament the
Council: Lament the
Lack
of
Leadership
November
2006
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I
don’t know whether to laugh or
cry about the Globe’s editorial on the UN Human Rights
Council on
November 24,
2006. On the one hand, the Globe took the Council
seriously enough to
write
an article about it. On the other hand, the
Globe was unsypathetic to UN difficulties, focused on
one part of the
Council's work and offered no real solution to the
difficulties.
The
Globe
acknowledged, with
provisos, that “Israeli policies that imperil civilian
lives are fair
game for
human rights panels”. On the negative side, the Globe
essentially sided
with the
US Ambassador who: “rightly called the council’s
obsessive focus on
Israel a
waste of limited resources …” The Globe concluded that
the Council is
“pandering
to the anti-Israeli and anti-Western sentiments of a
majority of its
members,
coddling those with lousy human rights records and
deliberately
avoiding cases
of major rights violations that certain influential
members find
politically
unpalatable to tackle.” This misses the point – and a
big part of the
whole
story.
The
Human
Rights Council is a
political body working on a full range of human rights
activities. The
naming of
countries like Israel
for specific reports is only a part of the agenda.
Since the days of
the
generals in Argentina,
this has been the difficult part of the agenda –
countries working hard
to avoid any
kind of country-based study. But the Council is also
the body which
maintains,
receives and recommends on reports from a range of
Rapporteurs and
Working
Groups on thematic topics like torture or arbitrary
detention. It
receives
reports and advises by resolution on the work of UN
human rights treaty
committees. It overseas human rights advisory services
in a range of
countries
and it carries out thematic studies on topics like
human rights and
terrorism.
As the Globe notes, Western countries do not control
the agenda.
So the
message is simply that Israel
was the point around which majority agreement could be
reached on the
most difficult agenda item. There
is a
possible message here. The West
has lost
any moral advantage which it might have used as
leverage.
Too
many
Western countries promote rights
elsewhere and don’t promote rights for everyone at
home. Almost every
country
has some human rights problem and the human rights
treaty committees
examine
these problems among signatory countries
systematically in turn.
Countries have different capacities to meet their
human rights
challenges. Western
countries have considerable capacity. Western
countries rightly accuse
other countries of not fully ensuring women’s
full
enjoyment of their rights. But some non-Western
countries are
encouraging the
rights of
migrants – non-citizens – which Western countries
choose to turn a
blind eye
to, Canada among them. There has been almost no formal
follow up to the
last two reports
and
recommendations to Canada
from the UN Human Rights Committee. Canada
has ignored requests
from
the UN Committee against Torture not to deport
non-citizens
whose
cases the Committee wished to examine because they
involved a risk of
consequential torture.
Don’t
lament the UN Human Rights
Council. Lament the
lack of well endowed countries willing to take a
lead in advancing
human rights
for groups under their jurisdiction they find
inconvenient!
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