U.S. 'Moral Authority' on Human Rights rests on Big Stick
Thalif DEEN
UNITED NATIONS: When the 192-member U.N. General Assembly meets in
mid-May to elect 14 new members to the 47-nation Geneva-based Human
Rights Council (HRC), the United States will be conspicuous by its
absence and missing from the ballot.
Justifying its decision, Washington says it will skip the elections
because the HRC has lost its "credibility" for focusing primarily on one
country - Israel - and ignoring "human rights abusers" such as Myanmar
(Burma), Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.
But U.N. diplomats, human rights activists and legal experts point
out that the administration of President George W. Bush
U.N. General Assembly session
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has no
legitimate right to sit in judgment over the transgressions of others
while its own "abusive behaviour" is not under scrutiny by any
international body.
"The United States does not have a shred of moral authority left; its
only authority is the big stick," Michael Ratner, president of the New
York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS.
He argued that the U.S. claim it is staying away from the elections
because the Council has lost its credibility is "bogus".
"It is the United States that has lost its credibility, and that is
why it would never be elected. Ask almost anyone in the world whether
the U.S. engages in torture - sadly the answer will be affirmative," he
added.
When the United States ran for a seat back in May 2001, it was ousted
from the former 53-member U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first
time since its creation in 1947.
The Commission was replaced by a Council last year. But Washington
also bypassed the first election, possibly fearing defeat. This is the
second consecutive year it has avoided elections to the U.N.'s supreme
human rights body.
An Asian diplomat told IPS that the resentment against Washington was
so intense at that time that many of the member states, including U.S.
allies, who publicly pledged their votes reneged on their promises
privately - and got away with it in a secret ballot voting.
The U.S. refusal to stand for elections has triggered sharp criticism
from at least one U.S. Congressman - Tom Lantos, a Democrat from
California - who described the decision as "an act of unparalleled
defeatism".
Lantos went one step further by accusing the Bush administration of
surrendering the HRC to "a cabal of military juntas, single-party states
and tin-pot dictators" who will retain "their death grip on the world's
human rights machinery."
The U.S. State Department said last month that the HRC is not a
"credible body" because it refused to pass strictures on some of the
world's major "human rights abusers", including Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Iran
and North Korea.
Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San
Francisco, says the United States is certainly not the only country
which has engaged in violations of international humanitarian law to an
extent that raises questions regarding the appropriateness of sitting on
the U.N.'s Human Rights Council.
Indeed, there are quite a few countries that are even worse, he
noted, particularly regarding the treatment of their own citizens.
"Still, there is perhaps no other country that is so self-righteous
about lecturing governments it doesn't like about their human rights
abuses while simultaneously defending its own human rights abuses of
foreign nationals as well as providing large-scale security assistance
to allied regimes which engage in even more egregious human rights
abuses," Zunes told IPS.
Even if Lantos' criticism may have hit some of the right targets,
says a senior U.N. official, he is certainly not unaware of the
firestorm of criticism triggered by human rights abuses in the Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo
Bay - along with the U.S. violation of Geneva Conventions governing the
treatment of prisoners of war.
Ratner said the Bush administration has never been willing to subject
its practices to scrutiny by any international body - not the United
Nations; not the Human Rights Council; not the International Court of
Justice at the Hague; and not the International Criminal Court.
"It is unwilling to do so because it fears that the truth will be
exposed: the U.S. is in violation of fundamental human rights principles
and the world knows it: it tortures, it disappears people, it disregards
Geneva, it holds people indefinitely without charges," Ratner told IPS.
Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the
Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, said that Washington's
decision has far less to do with the claimed reason - that the Council
has "failed" - but rather is rooted in fear that the U.S. would once
again (as it did in pre-9/11 2001) lose the election and thus fail to
win a seat on the Council.
She pointed out that human rights has always been the "other side" of
the U.N.'s recognition of national sovereignty as the primary basis for
the global organisation.
"Claims of conflict between the supposed absolutism of sovereignty of
the Charter and the commitment to individual rights inherent in the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights have long been the basis for U.S.
(and other countries') posturing as great defenders of human rights in
other countries, while expressing outrage that any international
organisation or any other country might criticise the rampant abuses
inside its own borders," Bennis told IPS.
That conflict has increased as U.S. human rights violations - which
used to focus on the death penalty, racism and discrimination, denial of
economic rights, etc. - have now focused laser-sharp on the individual
and globally-televised horrors of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the
"extraordinary rendition" torture programme, and other torture in the
context of the so-called "war on terror".
As a result, "the holier-than-thou stand above all you lesser
countries" attitude of U.S. diplomats at the United Nations and in
Washington has become almost a caricature of itself, said Bennis, author
of "Challenging Empire: How People, Governments, and the U.N. Defy U.S.
Power".
The Council, she said, may have at least a chance to develop into a
more coherent, grounded component of the U.N. system, capable in the
future of handling the delicate compromises between real sovereignty and
real human rights.
In an unusually long recent editorial titled "The Must-Do List", the
New York Times lashed out at the Bush administration for its continued
abuse of power and violations of civil liberties, described as the
founding principles of U.S. democracy.
The exhaustive charges against Washington included brutality towards
prisoners; the denial of their human rights; the institutionalisation of
such denials; unlawful spying on U.S. citizens; and the denial of legal
challenges in courts.
The editorial also called on the Bush administration to restore
habeas corpus; ban torture; close prisons run by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA); account for "ghost prisoners" held in secret
camps; ban secret evidence; and respect the right to counsel.
Meanwhile, as of last week, there were 15 countries vying for 14
vacant seats in the HRC. The African group had four candidates (Angola,
Egypt, Madagascar and South Africa) for four seats; the Asian Group four
candidates (India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Qatar) for four seats;
the East European states had two (Belarus and Slovenia) for two seats;
and the Latin American and Caribbean Group had two (Bolivia and
Nicaragua) for two seats.
Only the "Western European and Other States" group had three
candidates (Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands) for two seats,
triggering a contested vote, which is
scheduled to take place May 17.
(IPS) |