4-08-05 9:08 am

At the halfway point of the 61st session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called for reforming the 53-member body in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday.

Citing the commission's declining credibility due to its failure to prevent some major human rights atrocities, including the Rwanda genocide and the mass killings in the Sudan, and the commission's lack of 'a more comprehensive and objective approach,' Annan called for creating a smaller commission directly elected by a two-thirds vote of the UN General Assembly.

He also proposed elevating the status and authority of the new 'Human Rights Council' to the same level as the UN Security Council.

Perhaps in a swipe at the use of human rights issues as political weapons for political ends, Annan further stated a new human rights council must be a composed of the committed and should be more accountable and more representative. This could be achieved, Annan says, by selecting the council’s members with a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly, with those elected having a solid record of commitment to the highest human rights standards.

In a statement delivered at the UNCHR, Anna said, 'We have reached a point at which the Commission’s declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole, and where piecemeal reforms will not be enough.'

He added that that the time of simply declaring our support for human rights is over, 'giving way, as it should, to an era of implementation.'

'Creating a full-fledged council for human rights offers conceptual and architectural clarity. But what is most important is for the new body to be able to carry out the tasks required of it,' Annan declared. He added that a new council should be able to meet when necessary rather than for only six weeks a year as at present, with the explicit task of evaluating fulfillment by all states of all their human rights obligations.

The scope of the new council would include protecting civil, economic, political rights as well as the 'right to development' for poor countries under the rubric of human rights.

Proposed reform measures included strengthening the bodies that oversee the implementation of human rights treaties, and empowering and funding the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to expand its conflict prevention and crisis response machinery with a proper 'early warning' capability.

Annan's call for objectivity and comprehensiveness comes in the midst of a heated controversy between the US delegation and that of Cuba.

Following the Bush administration's policy of tightening the blockade of Cuba and trying to pressure other countries to isolate the island country, US representatives are pushing for a resolution that in effect would criticize the human rights situation in Cuba.

This measure is further designed to deflect from the serious human rights violations ordered and carried out by the Bush administration and the US military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and in US-controlled detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a display of double standards, the US State Department released country reports that leveled stinging criticisms aimed at political foes and economic competitors, while ignoring or only mildly rebuking allies with atrocious human rights records.

Human right problems that formed major parts of the State Department's critiques were also revealed to be widespread in the US, according to a Chinese report on human rights in the US that compiled its data from US-based news sources.

The call to reform the UNCHR comes at a moment when that body's credibility is at its lowest, due almost single-handedly to the US practice of politicizing human rights in order to achieve its foreign policy as well as domestic objectives.

This point was highlighted in the Swiss press. According to Swiss news agency SwissInfo, Swiss representative Peter Maurer, addressed his country’s support for Annan’s reform measures in a speech to the General Assembly, in which he stated, 'We support the proposal... to appoint a special rapporteur to examine the conformity of anti-terrorism measures with international norms for the protection of human rights.'

In an interview with international law expert Walter Kälin at Bern University in Switzerland, SwissInfo asked specifically about US mistreatment of prisoners held in its detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

From the context of the interview, it is clear that the questioner took for granted that the international community understood that Bush administration's policies on this matter violated accepted norms for human rights, but that the world was powerless to stop it.

Kälin replied, 'If, in a specific situation, one of its most powerful members no longer accepts to respect some of the most basic human rights, then the whole human-rights system will be jeopardized.'

Kälin quickly added that the international community didn't simply roll over for the Bush administration on this crucial issue of prisoner abuse. In fact, Bush's policies, to the credit of the world, were 'rejected by the other states.' He implied that the international community played a positive role in pressuring other parts of the US government to scale back Bush's policy.

The Bush administration’s response to Annan's proposal for the UNCHR was non-committal even as it blasted the secretary-general's broader reform proposals for the UN: expanding the UN Security Council and developing more rigorous and committed timelines for debt forgiveness for poor countries and fulfillment of promises by rich countries to provide economic aid.

So far the US lags behind all rich countries in provision of foreign aid as a percentage of its GDP despite its promise to provide about twice as much as it currently does.