EuropaWorld 11/5/2001 US is Furious at Human Rights Rebuff

The failure last week of the United States to be re-elected on to the 53 nation UN Human Rights Commission has caused more than just a flurry in the dovecotes. The United States Congress is furious at the snub and in the UN itself officials are reported as being worried by the potential reaction. The event is likely to have long lasting and major repercussions.

Although the US canvassed and received ample pledges of support beforehand when the votes came to be cast in the UN's Economic and Social Council it was found wanting. Competing for one of the three 'western' seats on the prestigious Commission the US could only manage fourth place behind France, Austria and Sweden.

This matters to Europe, of course, as it is a legitimate question whether three European Union member states whose human rights interests are governed by supranational conventions should or should not sit as individual countries in effect representing the same point of view.

That question may be asked later, for the moment both US and UN are trying to come to terms with and to explain the decision to remove the US from a place that it has held since the Commission's inception in 1947. After a closed meeting of UN system heads in New York this week, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, flew off to Washington for crisis talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell, reportedly in a state of 'some worry.'

For the UN the relationship with the United States is critical and not always easy. The US is the UN's major paymaster contributing almost a quarter of the world body's funding although this is not entirely reflected in the influence Uncle Sam is able to exercise in UN circles. There is a history of the US Congress being deeply critical of the UN, manifesting itself most clearly in the failure to pay UN dues on time. Despite an agreement reached at the end of last year that was supposed to clear the backlog of payments, the US still owes the UN some $1.5 billion - money that the UN urgently requires to compensate many poor countries for their contributions to past peacekeeping operations.

Now there is talk in the US Congress of withholding even some of the funds that have been authorised in an apparent attempt to ensure there should be no repetition next year of a similar snub to US dignity. No wonder Annan is worried. His reaction to this, expressed through his spokesman Fred Eckhard, was to point out that what had taken place was the result of an essentially democratic process involving only a fraction of the UN's membership. "Punishing all 189 member states would be counter productive," he said, "while punishing the bureaucracy would be unfair."

It is worthwhile to examine the reasons why the United States might have been voted off the Commission. The vote was of course by secret ballot and states are now unlikely to say for whom they voted or why they did not vote for whoever was not elected. No doubt different states had different reasons. Yet almost certainly it was a protest against US attitudes either to the Kyoto Protocol on carbon dioxide emissions which President Bush has refused to endorse, or to Bush's approval of a new Missile Defence System contrary, it is alleged, to the existing ABM treaty or quite possibly both. That's the problem with democracy: occasionally it democks.

What is clear is that Kofi Annan desperately fears any further rift between the United States and the broader international community represented in the UN system. In New York he was at pains to emphasise the contribution that the US had made on the Human Rights Commission and no doubt he will repeat to Secretary of State Powell his hope that the US will remain engaged in the Commission's work even as a non-member, pending reinstatement next year if that proves to be the democratic will.

Whatever happens it will be interesting to see whether this setback causes any change in human rights policies within the United States itself. Mary Robinson, the forthright UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, expressed "shock and dismay" when news of the Commission vote reached Geneva. Yet she has not been slow to convey her disappointment that the United States is not prepared to show more leadership in the human rights field in particular by ratifying the remaining three of the six core human rights treaties.

She has also voiced her concerns at the inequalities of treatment between ethnic groups in regard to issues such as the death penalty. While the United States continues to compete with China for the title of most executions carried out in a single year it is bound to carry the luggage of a question mark around its broad democratic and humanitarian ideals. And for this the United States may itself have paid the penalty.