"U.N. Human Rights Chief to Leave Post"

Subtitle: "High Commissioner Has Frequently Clashed With Bush Administration"

This article by Colum Lynch in The Washington Post of March 3, 2008 says that people close to Canadian jurist Louise Arbour is soon going to step down from her post as U.N. high commissioner for human rights. Arbour has apparently been controversial, including with the Buah administration.

In an interview Friday, she said the U.S.-led counterterrorism struggle has set back the cause of human rights by "decades" and has exacerbated a "profound divide" between the United States, its Western allies and the developing world. "The war on terror has inflicted a very serious setback for the international human rights agenda," she said.

Kristen Silverberg, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, said it is "wrongheaded to suggest" that the campaign against terrorism is the critical human rights issue of the times. "We would like to see the high commissioner focus more of her attention and criticism on totalitarian and abusive governments," she said.

Arbour describes herself as taking different approaches with different countries, seeking the approach with each that would have the greatest effect on improving recognintion of human rights. That sounds like a reasonable approach, although it does result in apparent inconsistency with worse human rights abusers in some cases less criticized in public than countries with good human rights records.

I think the United States should lead the world in respect for human rights and in global efforts to secure these rights for people everywhere. It has done so for many decades. Criticism for any abandonment of that leadership both from within the United States and from our allies in the fight for human rights is in my opinion fully justified.

Ms Silverberg is of course doing her job of defending the administration which she serves as best she can. Still, it is no wonder that those fighting for the recognition of human rights are distressed by the Bush administration which is brought us the conditions that allowed Abu Ghraib, which used waterboarding, which is convicted of extraordinary rendition and which lied about doing so in lands belonging to the United Kingdom, which refused to prosecute people cited for contempt of Congress for themselves refusing to answer to Congressional oversight, and which is now negotiating for amnesty for corporate executives thought to have helped it in illegally spying on Americans. Indeed, the United States can be criticized on human rights issues in the failure of the Bush administration to adequately help the majority minority populations affected by Hurricane Katrina, for the excessive numbers of people in our prisons (who disproportionately come from minorities), for our system which allows many poor to be outside our health insurance system, and for an education system which denies equal access to education to far too many kids who have the misfortune to live in school districts too cheap to offer them competitive schools.