Human Rights Council:  The Case for further Reform

The excellent opportunity to launch a model UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was partially wasted when this UN organ was created in 2006 with a much narrower scope than the initiative originally proposed by the former Secretary General, Kofi Annan.  However, it is true that this organ is undoubtedly a step forward in the fight for freedom and against impunity all over the World.  It is a step forward from the less effective Commission on Human Rights that is replacing.  But this is far from enough.

The international community did not take advantage of the original draft submitted by the Secretary General in the process that eventually gave birth to the UNHRC.  There was no political will from the majority of Member States to promote a model Council, one with a clear mandate to ban from membership those States with governments in violation of human rights as a matter of policy.

The worse drawback of the former Commission was the way it elected its members within the regional groups.  Some of these regions are plagued with governments backed by repressive laws flagrantly violating human rights and fundamental freedoms. Therefore, it was only to be expected at the time that they would nominate and eventually vote either for themselves or for their repressive peers.

The new Council was created -among other reasons- to limit or prevent such state of affairs.  Countries now announce their candidacies for the posts assigned to each Regional group with a declaration of intention on how they will behave, and the General Assembly (GA) elects the new members among the candidates by a simple majority vote.  The GA also retained the power to impeach elected members of the Council with a 2/3 vote.

Therefore, the election of violators has been restricted but not prevented.  It is a good omen that a few elected countries highlighted with reports of violations, are cooperating with UN monitoring missions and abiding by their rules.  But other facts talk by themselves.  Among the elected members, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Russia and Saudi Arabia have criminal and constitutional laws in violation of human rights and freedoms.  Even worse, Cuba and Nigeria have pending cases of human rights violations inherited from the former Commission with no declared intention of solving them. 

But worse among the worse, a rogue State such as Cuba has consistently refused entry visas to UN monitors mandated to investigate and report violations.  Nevertheless, Cuba received not less than 137 votes from the 192 GA Member States.  It was in fact one of the three most voted elected members from the Latin American Group (Mexico and Uruguay were the others) and therefore among the three granted an extended mandate of three years. 

That is a clear indication that the UNHRC needs sharp teeth as an advocate of human rights and the international community is thus obliged to advance some further reforms.  There is reason to believe that the new South Korean Secretary General will further this goal.   Let us hope that he does.

Paramount among the needed reforms is to ban any candidate with a record of refusing entry visas to UN monitors and to make conditional for candidates with cases pending to expedite their resolution during their elective mandates.  There should be an additional provision for UNHRC members that might happen to be included during their mandate among monitored countries, to have their voting rights suspended if they do not offer immediate cooperation to a UN mission.  If the issue were not resolved during the current session, the case should then be presented to the GA for impeachment.

Cuba promised in its written candidacy announcement to respect human rights.  Many justified their "yes" vote for the Cubans on an alleged expectation of reform.  The other "yes" votes belonged mostly to countries on the same league of violators.

It is only reasonable to expect that those electing to rule their countries as institutional violators should be banned from the Council.  The Cuban representative was very candid in the inaugural session of the Council by announcing that his government will not allow UN monitoring of human rights violations in Cuban soil under any circumstances.  At the very least, Cuba should be impeached on account of such dire declaration.  However, it is easy to see that a 2/3 vote for impeachment at the GA is a practical impossibility at the moment.

Cases such as this stress the urgency for a UNHRC reform. Above all, the provision to suspend voting rights to countries boasting their refusal to abide by the rules of the same UN body they are members of.

:::Gerardo E. Martínez-Solanas

Note:  The first election of the members of the newly established Human Rights Council (HRC) was held by the General Assembly on 9 May 2006. Term of office will begin on 19 June 2006.  [ see full details ]