US takes a seat at the Human Rights Council
The United States on Friday, June 19 became a full member of the United Nations Human Rights Council, having previously shunned the three-year-old body.
The world now waits to see what this change of course will mean for international dialogue on human rights.
Ambassador Susan Rice told the International Peace Institute Vienna Forum on June 15 that the US was committed to doing its part to strengthen the international human rights architecture.
"We will use that seat to push hard for balanced and credible action, to change the rules of the game, to scrutinize human rights records across the board, and to cast the spotlight on the world's worst abusers," she said, referring to the US membership on the council.
Chargé d'Affaires Mark C. Storella, temporary representative of the US to the United Nations Offices at Geneva, where the council is based, took a gentler tone when he delivered the first US statement as a full member of the council on June 19.
"The United States assumes its seat on the council with gratitude, humility and in the spirit of cooperation," he said, calling for all states to work together to provide a fair and credible forum for the advancement of human rights issues.
He also spoke of the US's legacy of slavery and called the promotion and protection of human rights "an enduring challenge."
The council's supporters in the US welcomed his words.
"Hopefully the days when the US representative gets into fisticuffs with the representative from Cuba are over," said J. Kirk Boyd, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, law school and the executive director of the 2048 Project, a group that advocates for international human rights laws. Boyd is also president of the Marin County, CA, chapter of UNA-USA.
But some fear that the council has shortcomings that the US will not be able to overcome. Brett Schaefer, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who focuses on the UN, said that the council has "demonized" the government of Israel while ignoring abuses in China and making a weak response to the situation in Sudan. The council suffers from the same politicization as the Human Rights Commission it replaced, he said, and the US should not try to fix it from within.
"Its presence will probably change a vote here, a vote there," Schaefer said, "but the challenges are too steep for any one nation to address. If you look at the composition of the council, a majority of the members are not free."
Besides concerns that the council is overly influenced by international politics, its mandate reveals that Americans are not in consensus on what constitutes a truly fundamental human right.
When the UN General Assembly created the Human Rights Council in March 2006, it reaffirmed that "all human rights must be treated in a fair and equal manner, on the same footing and with the same emphasis."
To that end, the council has designated independent experts, working groups and special rapporteurs to establish a global perspective on topics ranging from freedom of speech, the dumping of toxic wastes and judicial independence to the human rights implications of global climate change.
The council's work to date has placed greater emphasis on such issue-based analyses rather than confronting egregious human rights records of individual states. But Schaefer said this was a weak approach.
"Civil and political rights are given the same weight as things that in my opinion don't rise to the same level," he said. He argues that while civil and political rights are the foundation of good government, such a government, once in place, would reflect the opinion of its citizens on topics like access to medicine, water and food. "Things that in my mind are more along the lines of entitlements."
Boyd, at UC Berkeley, however, praised the council for looking seriously at how social and economic conditions constrain individuals' rights. The next step is for the US to reclaim its legacy of promoting health and education, he said, because policies under President George W. Bush created a mistaken impression that the US was uncommitted to social and economic rights.
"That's not our heritage, that's not our population," he said. "The US needs to reclaim its real image, instead of the miserly one portrayed by one administration."
Elvira Dominguez-Redondo, a senior lecturer in law at Middlesex University in London and an adjunct lecturer at the Irish Center for Human Rights, said she thought it would be good for the council if the US encouraged a more aggressive focus by helping to pinpoint human rights abuses in specific countries, but only if all countries were subjected to the same level of scrutiny.
"It's good, but it's only good if some of the Western countries are under scrutiny sometimes as well," she said.
As published in the UNA World Bulletin
tagged with: human rights, human rights council, UNA World Bulletin, United Nations, US foreign policy
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