Reports

2007-2008 Scorecard: How HRC Members Voted

Assessment of resolutions and country voting records of the UN Human Rights Council
in 2007-2008.

A Report by UN Watch
May 6, 2008

Click for Full Report (PDF)

To assess the work of the second year of the UN Human Rights Council, UN Watch focused on the council's most meaningful human rights actions. By meaningful, we mean resolutions and motions that were widely considered among HRC stakeholders to be important and were treated as such by members through their statements and actions. Resolutions on technical issues and those that passed by consensus and without significant debate were not considered meaningful for the purposes of our evaluation.

The most important class of resolutions for diplomats and human rights activists has always been the “name and shame” votes where a specific country is censured. Out of more than 190 UN member states, the Council’s predecessor body each year typically censured only five or six. The power of such denunciations in the world of human rights and the arena of international relations cannot, therefore, be underestimated. Large and small states alike exert considerable diplomatic efforts to avoid censure.

Even if they are major violators of human rights, powerful states, such as China or Russia, have routinely been shielded from condemnation. The same has held true for those that belong to large and powerful alliances—e.g., Zimbabwe, which belongs to the African Group and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), a political bloc of developing countries; or Saudi Arabia, a member of NAM, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an alliance of 57 Muslim nations.

In 2007-2008, the vast majority of states escaped censure by the Council, including serial violators such as Iran, China and Sri Lanka. There were only 18 country-specific resolutions, dealing only with a handful of countries: nine censures of Israel, four censures of Burma, one censure of North Korea, three non-condemnatory resolutions on Sudan, and one resolution that eliminated the Council’s mandate to investigate abuses in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Other meaningful votes included:

• An EU-sponsored resolution extending the Council’s mandate to protect freedom of religion.
  
• An amendment by the Islamic and African blocs that redefines the mandate of the expert on freedom of expression, now requiring him to police individuals who “abuse” their free speech. This was a dramatic reversal in the history of the UN.
  
• An Islamic-group text on “defamation of religion,” seeking to suppress perceived offenses against Islam, and to reinforce and justify domestic blasphemy laws, in contravention of the fundamental principle that international human rights law protects individuals, not religions.
  
• A resolution by Cuba limiting the independence of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, one of many regular acts of intimidation by regimes interested in hiding their abuses. The way in which countries voted demonstrates their commitment to protecting the UN’s non-political human rights mechanisms.

For the full text of the report, click here.