ON TUESDAY MAY 9, the United Nations elected members to the new Human Rights Council, among them China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Of the Council's forty-seven members, Freedom House considers almost one out of five to be "unfree." These member countries are: Algeria, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia. An additional fourteen Council members are rated only "partly free." So does anyone seriously expect these countries to serve as leaders in the struggle for human rights?
The Human Rights Council, created in April, is governed by different rules than was its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, which had become a parody of what a human rights body should be. Optimists insisted that, because of these rules--which, for example, intimidated such former members as Libya and Sudan from even running for election--the new body would be more accountable than the last. General Assembly President Jan Elliason called the creation of the new Council an "historic occasion" and said that it had the "legitimacy needed for the very important work of human rights."
After the election, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, told the New York Times, "The good news is that we did better than expected in the voting because Iran and Venezuela both lost. Venezuela's losing shows that bluster and anti-Americanism isn't enough to get elected." If those were the standards, it's no wonder some see the new body as little better than the last.
But the Human Rights Council promises to make a mockery of itself. According to the State Department's Country Report on Human Rights Practices released in March, China's human rights record is "poor" and getting poorer. The Asian giant increasingly harasses and imprisons those the government perceives as threatening to its authority. Cuba's record is likewise poor. Security forces there are nothing short of brutal in their efforts to stamp out dissent. More than 300 civil society activists remain imprisoned for thought crimes.
Ibrahim Mugaiteeb, a human rights monitor in Saudi Arabia, recently wrote that "most Saudis do not even know their rights." In Saudi Arabia, "hundreds and perhaps thousands of people rounded up in security crackdowns languish in prison for months and years without charge or trial. Some are guilty only of receiving an unsolicited text message from an exiled opposition figure."
How can Chinese, Cuban, and Saudi representatives hold other nations to account when they disdain individual rights and ignore rule-of-law at home? Indeed, many have exported their human rights abuses. China, as Khartoum's largest oil client, contributed to genocide in Darfur by supplying the Sudanese government with hard currency. In September 2004, Algeria, China, Pakistan and Russia--now all with seats on the Human Rights Council--were the only Security Council members to abstain from voting on a resolution to address the human rights abuses of Khartoum. China threatened to veto any proposals for an oil-embargo against the criminal regime.
Human rights agencies and U.S. officials point to the Council's refusal to elect Iran and Venezuela as an important sign of improvement over the former Commission on Human Rights. Though Iran and Venezuela ran for election and lost, they still received significant support from the 191 voters--the members of the General Assembly. Iran earned 58 votes. Venezuela earned 101, pushing it over the two-thirds majority threshold needed for victory, which it might have achieved had its neighbors not garnered even more votes. Better luck next year.
Each country that ran for a seat pledged to uphold the highest standards of human rights as a condition on its membership. Pledges effective when? In the lottery that determined the length of terms for the victors, Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia were lucky enough to pick straws granting them three-year terms--the longest possible, and an eternity for those in political prison.
The United States chose wisely not to run for a seat on the Council so as not to lend it legitimacy. Some critics say the American position on human rights is hypocritical at best, pointing to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as examples of U.S. human rights abuses. But moral equivalency falls flat. In the United States, human rights activists can press their case in the courts--let the better argument win. In Cuba, China, and Saudi Arabia, such matters are resolved in grimmer ways.
Suzanne Gershowitz is a writer living in Washington.
