"The Bush administration is defending itself against criticism that it has not followed through on promises to lead a vigorous campaign at the United Nations to establish an effective new human rights council to condemn rights abusers.....
"The Bush administration responded last week with a new high-level push in New York and foreign capitals to rally support for a strong council to replace the Human Rights Commission, whose credibility has suffered because of the membership of noted rights abusers, including Zimbabwe and Sudan. A six-month stretch of negotiations on the new council resumed Wednesday."
The article suggests that "John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been unduly fatalistic about the prospects for success, indicating he is prepared to abandon the effort if he cannot overcome opposition to a credible council.......
"Until recently, Bolton's priority at the United Nations has been restructuring the organization's bureaucracy to upgrade its management and combat corruption.
"Negotiations on the human rights council had been left to Mark P. Lagon, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. William E. Lucas, his deputy, managed the day-to-day talks through a critical stage of negotiations last month.
"Some delegates said they interpreted Bolton's absence from the talks as a signal that the issue is low on Washington's priority list."
The San Mateo Times provides a stronger tone (Bolton has wrong solution for U.N. human rights council):
For months, we have been arguing that the Bush administration has generally the right substantive agenda for badly needed changes at the United Nations, but that Ambassador John Bolton's scorched-earth alternative to diplomacy is undermining the prospects for successfully achieving these reforms.
Now it turns out that our criticism has been only half-right in at least one crucial area — in restoring the United Nations' moral authority on human rights by excluding egregious violators from a new human rights monitoring council. Bolton's latest proposal on this gets the substance wrong as well.
And the Washington Times reports (Rights council stalled):
U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton warned delegates that "membership on the commission by some of the world's most notorious human rights abusers mocks the legitimacy of the commission and the United Nations itself."
The United States, which has advocated a ban on human rights abusers serving on the Human Rights Council, appears to have dropped an effort to win permanent seats for the five permanent members of the Security Council, which would have guaranteed seats to Russia and China, and disturbed nations concerned by U.S. treatment of prisoners of war or its use of the death penalty.
This goes beyond my expertise, but I would guess that key issue in replacing the existing U.N. Human Rights Commission with a higher ranking U.N. Human Rights Council would be the membership of the new Council, and perhaps more importantly, how that membership would be determined in the future, and what powers would be given to different members. The United Nations decides issues on the basis of one member, one vote. The United States will not succeed in getting a strong Human Rights Council unless it can form a coalition of countries to vote for a single plan. It is not clear in my mind that any Council that was likely to take strong action to protect human rights, and that would include the member states with the strength needed to make such action effective, would get the votes needed for it to come into existance The Security Council was created at the end of World War II, when the U.N. had many fewer members, the United States had much more influence over other nations, and the war had scared leaders into recognizing a need to promote national security, and yet it was difficult to achieve the needed consensus for its creation.
Let us hope that the debate on the Human Rights Council will prove fruitful.
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