Global Summit Against Discrimination and Persecution
Photo Credit: Adam Nadler
United Nations, Sep 26, 2011 (IPS) - An international coalition of NGOs is pushing for countries that regularly violate human rights to be barred from U.N. agencies including the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHCR) and U.N. Women.
"We call on the United Nations to continue on the path of reform by suspending China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia from the UN Human Rights Council," stated an international coalition of NGOs in its "Declaration of Dissidents for Universal Human Rights."
The declaration served as the outcome document of the Global Summit Against Discrimination and Persecution, held in New York Sep. 21 and 22, as a side event of the U.N. General Assembly.
In addition to the suspension of the four countries from UNHCR, NGOs also called for Iran to be eliminated from the Commission on the Status of Women and Saudi Arabia to be expelled from the executive board of U.N. Women.
In the past, human rights defenders have succeeded in excluding Libya, Iran and Syria from UNHCR, even as some believe that the international community has failed to act unanimously against human rights violators.
"Tragically, the governments who are the members of the Council… failed in their mandate to protect human rights worldwide. There has never been a resolution (against China). China is a member of the Security Council. It is upside down," Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, told IPS.
In other instances, Libya was elected chair of the Human Rights Commission in 2003 and Gaddafi's regime was a member of the Human Rights Council before its suspension in February 2011.
David Keyes, executive director of Advancing Human Rights, another NGO that sponsored the summit, said that the United Nations "has lost much of its effectiveness and its impact has been diminished by allowing some of the worst human rights violators in the world to set the agenda".
Meanwhile, doubts remain about the motivations of many NGOs that participated in the event.
U.N. Watch, the primary organiser of the summit, is affiliated with the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and has been very active in combating perceived anti-Israel positions in the U.N.
It has also been a strong critic of UNHCR. According to James Paul, executive director of Global Policy Forum, the view they promote is strong in Washington and is aligned with Israel policy.
"This is a highly politicized view of how human rights have to be pursued in the world. We should be suspicious of what the motivations of this conference were, who was organizing it and for what purpose," Paul told IPS.
"It is a completely unbalanced way of understanding how human rights have to be defended in the world and what the U.N. is all about and why is it important for the U.N. to be a universal institution," he added.
Paul believed that the effectiveness of the Human Rights Council would not improve with the elimination of certain members. At the same time, he pointed out the absence of some important human rights organizations at the event.
"Where is Amnesty? Where is Human Rights Watch? Where is the International Federation? The absence of those organizations at this event tells us something. I think this was a movement to discredit the Human Rights Council and the U.N. more generally in a time when the Palestinians are coming up with their proposals," he said.
Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have been very critical of Israeli actions, particularly in the West Bank.
Also part of the debate was the issue of U.N. reform, especially in the Security Council, whose five permanent members have veto power: China, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
For Hillel Neuer, reforming the Security Council would not guarantee change in human rights policy, and eliminating veto power would be unrealistic and useless.
"In the real world, you want to have the major powers at the table and that is what the Security Council wanted to reflect. I don't think it will be easy to remove the veto power," Neuer said.
Paul, who is in favour of reforming the Security Council and eliminating both the veto and permanent seats, says the best way to organise a reformed Council is on a regional basis.
Chinese dissident and founder of Initiatives for China, Yang Jianli, believed that the voting power of a member state and the possibility of vetoing resolutions "should be linked to and based on the degree of democracy in the country".
"China has led the world for over 60 years in jailing dissidents, independent scholars and journalists, fringing on freedoms of press, religion and association, but the world leaders seem unable or unwilling to do anything about it," Yang told IPS.
Yang was arrested in 2002, sentenced to five years of prison for allegedly spying and subjected to torture multiple times.
The U.N. has the mechanisms, through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights treaties, "to apply pressures on various governments, especially the members of the UN Human Rights Council", Yang said.
According to Neuer, NGOs like U.N. Watch play an important role in addressing the demands of the victims of human rights violations and must push for the enforcement of rules and policies against them.
"They [NGOs] have to be the voice of the principles, of truth. We have to plant the seed of what is just and what is right and let the world events take their course. China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Russia should be removed. It is the right thing to do," he said.
But for Paul, this polarization between good and bad countries is not the right answer to the problem of the protection of human rights, especially in times when there are international interventions in Libya and possibly in Syria, that according to him, respond to "western economic aspirations".
"We regret human rights abuses, but the idea that we have to expel certain countries and decide between good guys and bad guys brings us back to a kind of cold war conception of what is going on," he concluded.
