The Bolton archipelago

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.

By Ian Williams

A UN General Assembly vote on establishing the new Human Rights Council is a fairly devastating comment on current US global prestige as well as the effectiveness of diplomacy as practiced by US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton.

The vote to replace the largely discredited Commission on Human Rights with the new council was 170-4, with the United States,
Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau voting against the resolution and with three abstentions.

While the US has said much about the human-rights behavior of many UN member states, there is a strong feeling that Washington and its ambassador do not really have the moral standing to hector others.

The three nations the US led in opposing the new council are probably the top per capita recipients of US cash - along with the Federated States of Micronesia, which even Bolton couldn't bully enough.

The Marshall Islands and Palau, micro-states in the Pacific, depend upon the US Congress for their entire budgets. There is an additional irony. For many decades the United States stalled in allowing the former trustee territory of Palau its independence until it dropped clauses in its constitution preventing the US from bringing nuclear weapons in to defend it. Residents of the Marshall Islands are still trying to get compensation for the time they spent as human guinea pigs during the days of nuclear testing on their atolls.

And of course Israel owes a lot of vetoes to the US.

Most United Nations member states recognized that despite the many compromises, General Assembly president Jan Eliasson and Secretary General Kofi Annan pulled together what could be an effective and workable Human Rights Council - despite the Bolton blusterings.

One of their most effective pieces of diplomacy was persuading Cuba not only to drop its proposed amendments but to vote for the resolution. It may be that one their most potent weapons was the shame and ignominy that Havana would have felt in joining Washington in a "no" vote.

As for the three abstentions, it's unlikely Venezuela, Belarus and Iran could be considered part of the US administration's dream team. Ironically, they might have voted against the resolution except for their revulsion at putting up their hands alongside the US and Israel.

Bolton's grandstanding played well for domestic audiences - but got nowhere with the rest of the world, not least because the rest of the world had its own sources for what had happened in negotiations and did not rely on Bolton and the US State Department for details.

For example, many diplomats at the UN feel that if the US delegation had actively and constructively participated in negotiations instead of posturing for domestic constituencies, then the electoral requirement for a two-thirds majority for new members to the council would have passed.

However, although Bolton later jumped on the bandwagon of Annan's proposal for a two-thirds majority vote for future members, it was only after it had disappeared in the course of negotiations. And he was almost certainly quite pleased.

But Bolton was very reserved on the proposed two-term limits for council members and indicated initially that he would have preferred a permanent seat for the United States, even if it entailed one also going to China, hardly a paragon of human rights.

The US has lost votes at the old Human Rights Commission - that was before the administration of President George W Bush added "Guantanamo", "Abu Ghraib" and "renditions" (whereby suspected terrorists are taken into US custody but delivered to a third-party state) to the world's human-rights vocabulary and when it was a simple majority.

The United States' diplomatic approach to human rights is, in its own way, every bit as partisan and partial as some of the notorious human-rights offenders who have conspired to emasculate the Human Rights Commission over the years.

Indeed, the best weapon the axis of offenders in the old commission had was the United States' attitude, which, for example, condoned, trained and financed some of the worst human-rights offenders of the era in Central America while fulminating against Cuba's much less serious, although not negligible, offenses. Disagreement with the US should not necessarily put a country in the dock for human-rights offenses - although neither should opposing the US allow an exemption.

It did not help that one of the last reports of the now-condemned Human Rights Commission was on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, in which the experts roundly condemned the United States' breaches of international law. Though their conclusions were not that different from the US Supreme Court's, that the internees had legal rights and should have access to the courts, the Bush administration and its supporters attacked the report in terms that could have been borrowed from a riposte by Cuba, Uzbekistan or Syria.

The new council has addressed the genuine concerns of many members by adopting the principle of "universality" in a constructive way, instead of the usual blocking context in which it is used at the UN. All members' human-rights records will come under scrutiny. The axis of offenders' main purpose in getting on the former commission was to block consideration of their own cases, so this removes much of the incentive for them to be on the council.

Indeed, since the members of the council may well be the first to be scrutinized, there may well be an actual disincentive, not least because many delegations have promised a thorough scrutiny of the credentials of candidates.

Countries that are genuinely concerned about human rights need to eschew their usual cozy rotas and regional voting pacts, but we can be sure that the human-rights non-governmental organizations will keep their feet to the fire. And as for the US, it would be good if it voted on the basis the State Department's own annual Human Rights Reports, which has managed to be critical even of allies.

Ironically, the states that will run for election to the new council in the next few months will be praying above all that the US does not publicly support their candidacies. It would be a fatal embrace.

One must assume that the scale of the US defeat in the vote may have taken some of the bounce out of Bolton, and certainly the State Department rapidly announced that the US would be constructively engaged in the council and its work. The US neither invented human rights, nor does it now have them under trademark protection.

Along with the "Responsibility to Protect" report (which was adopted last year and looks at when it is appropriate to intervene when the citizens of a state are at risk), the Human Rights Council is a big step forward for the United Nations and a worthy testimonial to Annan's second term. However, far from rewards by the US Congress, watch out for attacks for the world's temerity in disagreeing with Bolton.

Ian Williams is author of Deserter: Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans and His Past, Nation Books, New York.