The InterDependent

The State Department announced on March 30 that the United States would start campaigning a year ahead to renew its membership on the United Nations Human Rights Council in the 2012 council elections, when its current term ends. The announcement came with a list of changes the Obama administration believes it has achieved, which warrant remaining on the council despite opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Only two days earlier, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that she would introduce legislation that, among other things, calls for a U.S. withdrawal from the council, saying that the administration’s efforts to reform it had failed.

Not so, says the State Department and numerous human rights advocates who follow the council closely. On its list of accomplishments, or initiatives it has introduced or backed, are the creation of a monitor for human rights in Iran; a special session on abuses by Laurent Gbagbo, the defeated president of Côte d’Ivoire, who was refusing to give up his position; a meeting on Libya that led to the country’s losing its council seat; and the continuation of rights monitoring in Burma, North Korea and Sudan.

“The very welcome successes at the March session of the Human Rights Council demonstrate what can be achieved when there is advance planning, high-level involvement, credibility on the issues and strong coordination both in capitals and Geneva,” said Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Human Rights. “We can only wish for a similar laserlike focus on the review and reform of the council, including eliminating the separate agenda item on Israel when the rest of the world is considered under a single omnibus agenda item. That would go a long way toward restoring the credibility of the council.”

Jean-Marc Ferre/UN Photo

The chambers of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, under the painted elliptical dome. The U.S. recently announced it would seek a second term at the UN agency, listing numerous achievements in the last two years.

On global issues of human rights and civil and political liberties, the U.S. was a sponsor of the first resolution to establish a watchdog function on freedom of expression and assembly. Washington pushed through a measure setting up a working group to report on discrimination against women in law and practice.

In two groundbreaking initiatives, the U.S. helped secure an objective resolution on freedom of religion that sank the “defamation of religion” bid by Islamic nations and their allies aimed at mostly non-Muslims. It also led a group of 85 nations to sign a statement defending gay, lesbian and other sexual-orientation rights. Missing from the statement were Arab nations and South Asia countries, including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. But Nepal has stepped up its support for universal rights in recent years under UN tutelage.

At the United Nations Foundation in Washington, Timothy E. Wirth, the organization’s president, welcomed the U.S. decision to stay the course on the council, saying that it was an appropriate move given the long history of American support for human rights. (UNA-USA, which publishes The InterDependent, is part of the United Nations Foundation.)

“In 2009, I joined with many human rights leaders in calling for the Administration to re-engage in the Human Rights Council. It was clear then and it is even clearer now that working from within, the United States can make a substantial difference in protecting human rights globally and improving the work of the UN,” Wirth said in a statement.

“Though the Council isn’t perfect, it has become more balanced since the U.S. re-engaged,” he added. “It is critical for the United States to remain at the table to help lead the way forward.”

In 2009, when the U.S. sought a seat for the first time, reversing a decision by President George W. Bush not to take part in the newly created council, New Zealand had to give up its bid to make room for Washington on the slate submitted by the group known as Western European and Others – in UN jargon, WEOG – with the “others” including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. The 47-member Human Rights Council supplanted the discredited Human Right Commission in 2006, a step strongly urged by Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the time.