NEWS THAT the United States has been elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council comes as a welcome affirmation that it is to take a more active role in this important aspect of the world organisation’s work. The decision to stand was a deliberate distancing by the Obama administration from George Bush’s approach. He refused to participate in the new council, set up in 2006 as a successor to the long-standing Human Rights Commission, on the grounds that it endorsed tyranny and had a systematic anti-Israeli bias. Mr Obama believes it is better for the US to be inside the tent working the system and seeking to improve it rather than standing so critically outside.
This is a sensible course, in keeping with his more general foreign policy objective of reasserting multilateralism to improve the US’s international standing. A central aspect of the new approach is to rely more on the UN and its agencies. Many of them are cumbersome and dominated by regional groups like this council, including by states which deserve to be much more the objects of human rights investigations than active participants. Nevertheless, there has been much good work done by the council, which is due for a systematic review in 2011. Each of its members is put to account on its own human rights record. This means the US position on torture, Guantánamo and use of the death penalty will come under scrutiny, along with similar investigations into Russia, Saudi Arabia, China or Cuba, which are also members.
Conflicting political and philosophical definitions of human rights are inevitable in such a diverse setting; but these must be interpreted under the rubric of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which govern and mandate its work, together with other key UN documents. Many western critics of the council concentrate only on civil and political rights, disregarding economic, social or cultural ones which are as important, or more so, for less developed states. While double standards are inseparable from international diplomacy, that realisation should not invalidate honest efforts to forge an international ethics capable of bringing injustice and tyranny to proper account.
Pro-Israeli lobby groups have been especially critical of the Human Rights Council, accusing it of systematic bias and supporting boycott campaigns against it. The Obama administration now joins other governments which prefer to influence these and other UN proceedings by open and active participation and argument – as in the walkout by many western delegations from the recent “Durban II” review conference on racism in Geneva because of anti-Israeli comments by the Iranian president, after which that gathering went on to reach useful conclusions when these delegations returned.
The human rights agenda is onerous, demanding and is certainly not monopolised by states which are often its most egregious transgressors. But this is best pursued by participating in the UN’s work, not standing aside from it.