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By Warren Hoge
The New York Times
Friday 07 April 2006
United Nations - The United States said Thursday it would not be a candidate for the new United Nations Human Rights Council, which was approved last month by the General Assembly with Washington nearly alone in opposition.
Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said the United States would sit out the first election for the council in May but would support other countries with strong human rights records and would probably run for a seat next year.
The council, which will hold its first meeting in Geneva in June, replaces the Human Rights Commission, which had been widely discredited for allowing notorious rights abusers like Sudan and Zimbabwe on the panel.
The election of the 47 new members is scheduled for May 9. As of Thursday, 40 countries, including China, Cuba and Iran, had formally signed up to run.
Thursday's announcement by the State Department followed weeks of intense consultations throughout the Bush White House that appeared to many United Nations officials to be preparing the ground for American participation on the panel.
Several members of Congress, including some of the United Nations' harshest Republican critics, had joined rights groups in lobbying the Bush administration to make the United States a candidate.
Although it voted against the council last month, saying that the new membership requirements still would not do enough to keep major human rights violators out, the United States had agreed to help finance the panel and pledged to support it.
"This is a major retrenchment in America's long struggle to advance the cause of human rights around the world and it is a profound signal of U.S. isolation at a time when we need to work cooperatively with our Security Council partners," said Representative Tom Lantos of California, the top Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and a founding co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
Mr. Lantos said the decision "projects a picture of profound weakness in U.S. diplomacy."
Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, said it was a mistake for the United States to wait for future elections to run.
"All key decisions about serious reform issues, from the curtailment of inappropriate bodies to whether and how countries are scrutinized, will be made in the first year," she said.
Countering that argument, John R. Bolton, the United States envoy, said, "I believe rather strongly that our leverage in terms of the performance of the new council is greater by the U.S. not running and sending the signal 'this is not business as usual' this year than if we were to run."
Among the Republican critics who had counseled joining the panel were Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who has frequently called for Secretary General Kofi Annan to quit; Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman; and Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, who is sponsor of a bill that would withhold United States dues from the United Nations.
When Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, proposed a resolution on March 31 calling for an American boycott of the new council, Representative Christopher H. Smith of New Jersey, another Republican detractor of the United Nations, put out a statement urging the resolution's defeat.
Human rights groups speculated that the United States was worried that revelations of abuses of detainees in Iraq and of clandestine prisons abroad had raised fears in the Bush administration that it could not get the 96 votes in the 191-member General Assembly needed for election.
"It's unfortunate that the Bush administration's disturbing human rights record means that the United States is today hardly a shoo-in for election to the council," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.
The new council was approved on March 15 by a 170-to-4 vote, with Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau joining the United States in opposition. Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstained.
A Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee, Robert Wexler of Florida, singled out Mr. Bolton for isolating the United States and thwarting the United Nations human rights effort.
"This decision reflects the colossal diplomatic failures of Ambassador Bolton," he said. "It's a national disgrace for America that we will not be a present in guiding and leading that council in a productive direction, and that under Mr. Bolton's leadership at the U.N. the world's single superpower cannot muster up the necessary votes to win an election."
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