PROPOSED HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL

Oral Statement by United Nations Watch

Delivered by Hillel C. Neuer

June 20, 2005

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Commission on Human Rights, 61st Session

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Open Ended Informal Consultations on the Recommendations
on Human Rights Contained in the Report of the Secretary General (A/59/2005)

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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First, we thank Mexico and other states who took the lead at ECOSOC in successfully overruling Commission Decision 2005/116. The Commission’s attempt to convene a five-day inter-sessional meeting, followed by a Special Session, was initiated by certain member states to scuttle the Secretary-General’s proposed reforms of this Commission. We note the complex deadlock that took place within ECOSOC on this issue, which explains the anomaly that ECOSOC’s resulting resolution of L/11 Rev.1 required the Chair to prepare a summary of today’s consultations by the 15th of June — five days before the actual event. We urge member states not to obstruct or complicate the progress occurring in New York.

Mr. Chairman,

We applaud the Secretary-General for his bold proposal to establish a new, credible and effective Human Rights Council.

The compelling need to overhaul this Commission was plainly demonstrated at the recently concluded session in April. The world’s foremost human rights forum once again failed to even consider most of the world’s worst abuses, turning a blind eye to the denial of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia; repression of political freedoms in Zimbabwe; and state-organized violence against journalists in Iran.

The human rights crimes committed by the regime in Sudan—a government that continues to aid and abet the mass rape and killing of hundreds of thousands of Black Africans in Darfur—was dealt with as a matter of “Technical Cooperation,” under Agenda Item 19, instead of as a gross human rights violation under Item 9.

Is Sudan’s mass rape and killing “technical cooperation in the field of human rights”? According to this Commission, it is.

The most important issue is composition. If the future human rights body continues to be dominated by member states whose regimes are inherently hostile to basic freedoms and democracy, all other reforms will be futile.

To quote Judge Learned Hand, “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” At this Commission, the protection of liberty and human rights lies in the heart of member states; when it is absent there, no reform, no new procedure, no added budget will be able to save it.

Accordingly, we strongly endorse the Secretary-General’s call to form a “society of the committed.”

We support his call to require a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly. We are concerned that many states today, such as Cuba, the OIC, the Arab Group, and the African Group opposed the Secretary-General on this.

Most importantly, we support the Secretary-General’s statement, made in this Hall two months ago, that membership be limited to states with “a solid record of commitment to the highest human rights standards.”

UN Watch is disappointed that the Draft Outcome Document fails to deal with this vital issue, and that states such as Egypt, speaking on behalf of the Arab Group, today opposed the Secretary-General’s proposal for criteria.

In addition, as a partner in the NGO Coalition for the U.N. Democracy Caucus, we urge members of the Community of Democracies to support the agreement reached at the Santiago Ministerial meeting in April to “[g]ive serious consideration to the candidacy of countries contributing effectively to the promotion and protection of democracy and human rights worldwide in bodies which focus on elements of democratic governance.”

We support the Draft Outcome Document’s endorsement of the UN Democracy Fund, but are concerned that language related to democracy in that Document is otherwise weak. It speaks only of democracy as a value “implying the will of the peoples to express and decide freely their own political system.” We would prefer to see an express reaffirmation of Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Mr. Chairman,

The SG’s proposal must be taken as a whole. The great danger is that we will empower a body that the SG and others have condemned as lacking credibility—and as one which “casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole”— without first curing the underlying problem, being composition. A standing Council, elevated to the status of a Charter body, will make sense if the Council is animated by the spirit of liberty.

The Secretary-General asked for an end politicization and selectivity. The most egregious example is this body’s gross discrimination against Israel. Human Rights Watch recently criticized the Commission’s “selectivity” on this issue, noting its failure to condemn Palestinian terrorism (http://hrw.org/english/docs/2005/03/10/isrlpa10290.htm ). Due to the campaign led by the Arab and Islamic states, and encouraged or tolerated by many others, the Commission singles out Israel for differential and discriminatory treatment throughout the debates. It devotes an entire Agenda Item, No. 8, to attacking Israel. The country-specific resolutions against Israel equal the total combined for all other countries under Item 9. When the Commission meets in regional groups, Israel alone is excluded. The Secretary-General has called for an end to this long-standing anomaly.

This is not a side-issue. As all of you know, this is a material issue which monopolizes a large part of our work at the Commission, which undermines its credibility and which assaults the core principles of equality that underlie the Universal Declaration.

[Speech was ended here for time.]