Tuesday, May 4, 2010
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad campaigned in Uganda and Zimbabwe. Behind the scenes, his flunkies twisted arms and offered favors. For weeks, feelers were sent out to all kinds of unlikely allies. What was the diplomatic prize at stake? Nothing less than a seat on the United Nations council on human rights.
Which was perfectly appropriate: Despite its title, this is a committee whose past members — Syria, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe among them — have not been renowned for their adherence to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. On the contrary, authoritarian regimes have long battled to join the council and its predecessor organizations, the better to prevent any outsiders from investigating their own governments. Once they became members, much of their time was spent denouncing Israel and the United States, while studiously avoiding anything that might sound like, say, criticism of Russian behavior in Chechnya.
Different American administrations have adopted different approaches to this peculiar institution. In recent years the United States has quit the council, denounced the council and isolated the council, generally with bipartisan support. Perhaps the only New York Times editorial ever written in praise of John Bolton, President Bush’s pugnacious U.N. ambassador, complimented him for advocating its radical reform.
Yet the council kept working to the advantage of its members: The fact is that in such places as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe, praise — or even lack of condemnation — from something called the “U.N. human rights council” still carries a good deal of political weight. We might roll our eyes when a committee headed by Libya solemnly pats China on the back for its good behavior in Tibet, but in China this makes useful propaganda. We might not take seriously the umpteenth denunciation of Israel by yet another U.N. body, but the Syrian government probably finds it useful.
Knowing this to be the case, the Obama administration, while it was pressing its other reset buttons, decided to rejoin the council in 2009, the better to “reform the institution from within.” This was not just a gesture of friendship to the human rights council but an olive branch for the United Nations itself: We were going to engage with the process, work with others, use diplomacy. We were going to change the way the committee functioned, make the United Nations work for democratic values and not against them…
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