The Need for Reform
Over the years, the UN Commission on Human Rights—which drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights under the leadership of its first chair, Eleanor Roosevelt—had less and less lived up to that document's promises. In recent years, the body counted among its members some of the world's most repressive regimes: Cuba, Libya (its 2003 chair), Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, for example. These regimes were able to join the Commission because there were no membership standards beyond nomination by their regional group. Once on the Commission, they sat in judgment of others while shielding their own records of abuse.
As a result, the Commission became infected by politicization and selectivity. Too often, it ignored serious situations of gross human rights violations. In its 2005 session, for example, the Commission failed to even consider the denial of women’s rights in Saudia Arabia, the repression of political freedoms in Zimbabwe, or the state-organized violence against journalists in Iran. Yet it adopted four resolutions condemning Israel, a number equal to the total of its resolutions against all other states in the world. (Belarus, Cuba, Myanmar, and North Korea were the subject of one resolution each.) To read more about the Commission's anti-Israel bias, click here.
The Reform Process
In his March 2005 report entitled "In Larger Freedom," UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recognized that the Commission's "declining credibility and professionalism . . . cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations' system as a whole." He recommended that it be replaced with a smaller Human Rights Council, comprised of states with "a solid record of commitment to the highest human rights standards." In September 2005, leaders at the UN World Summit resolved to create such a council, but they left its contours undefined. For the six months that followed, member states engaged in a difficult negotiation process to hammer out the details of this new body. There were serious disagreements, most significantly over whether there should be criteria for Council membership, and whether the Council should be able to address human rights situations in individual countries. To read a more detailed discussion of the negotiations, click here.
The result of the negotiations was a compromise text submitted to the UN General Assembly by its President, Jan Eliasson, in late February of 2006. The text significantly weakened some of the key elements of Annan's reform proposal, including the requirement that candidates for membership pass a 2/3 vote threshold. "A once-promising reform proposal," commented the International Herald Tribune, "has been so watered down that it has become an ugly sham, offering cover to an unacceptable status quo." Nevertheless, on March 15, 2006, the General Assembly enacted the text as resolution A/RES/60/251 by a vote of 170 in favor, 4 against, and 3 abstaining.
The Result: the Human Rights Council
The resolution created the Human Rights Council, a subsidiary body of the General Assembly that will sit in Geneva, to replace the Commission. The Council will have 47 members, a small reduction from the Commission's 53. All UN member states are eligible to submit their candidacy. Seats on the Council are proportionately allotted among the UN's regional groups—13 to the African Group, 13 to the Asian Group, 6 to the Eastern European Group, 8 to the Latin American and Caribbean Group, and 7 to the Western European and Others Group (WEOG). This was the former practice as well, but a reallotment of the seats reduced the representation of WEOG, which means a loss for democracies.
Council membership now requires more than just regional group approval. To be elected, a country must receive the votes of an absolute majority of General Assembly members (96 votes). This innovation will only be meaningful, however, if member states break with the entrenched practice of automatic bloc voting, which has yielded egregious and even obscene results—like the UN's repeated votes against condemning Sudan's atrocities in Darfur.
In deciding whether to vote for a particular country, member states are supposed to "take into account the candidates' contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights and their voluntary pledges and commitments made thereto." A Council member that "commits gross and systematic violations of human rights" may be suspended from membership by a two-thirds vote of General Assembly members present and voting. This option was much trumpeted by advocates of the GA resolution, but the sad reality at the UN is that it is impossible to find two-thirds of countries to condemn any human rights abuser.
In addition, Council members will be the first to undergo the new, as yet undefined, universal periodic human rights review that the Council will ultimately conduct for all member states. Whether this change will be meaningful depends on what the review process will entail, which was left by the resolution for the Council itself to determine.
Other important matters left up to the Council for decision during its first year include the setting of its agenda, its working methods, and its rules of procedure (including rules for observer and NGO participation).
The First Council Election
Unfortunately, the first Council's membership, which was elected on May 9, 2006, represents only a slight improvement over that of its predecessor. Of the 47 new members, only 25—a slight majority of 53 percent—are rated Free by Freedom House in its most recent worldwide survey of political rights and civil liberties. Although this is a small improvement over the 2006 Commission’s figure of 45 percent, it is not the hoped-for significant break from the past.
Additionally, the new Council includes 9 countries—19 percent of its total membership—that are rated as Not Free. Four of these nine, moreover, are among Freedom House’s “Worst of the Worst” human rights violating regimes. These four—China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia—also are among five countries that UN Watch identified, before the May 9 election, as particular threats to the Council’s legitimacy. Sadly, all four received well over the 96-vote threshold that was supposed to prevent violators from winning Council membership.
The Council's First Year
Unlike the Commission, which met once a year for a six-week session, the Council will meet regularly throughout the year for at least ten weeks. The Council convened for the first time on June 19, 2006, and met for two weeks. It met again in September 2006, for three weeks, and in late November 2006, for two weeks. In March 2007, it met for four weeks, and in June 2007 for one week.
The Council's early sessions have had some positive aspects, such as its attitude toward the participation of NGOs and its initial steps toward creating new mechanisms. However, its treatment of substantive human rights issues has unfortunately displayed the same politicization and selectivity that had marred the Commission.
In its first eleven months of existence, the Council only censured one country in the entire world for human rights violations: Israel. As of June 2007, it had adopted nine condemnatory resolutions and held three special sessions against the Jewish state. The only other country on which the Council passed resolutions during this period was Sudan, related to the situation in Darfur, but none of these resolutions found the Sudanese government responsible for human rights violations.
UN Watch Views and Analysis
For UN Watch's reports analyzing the Council's first year, see
Our statements to the Council are available here. Also see our press releases and UN Briefing newsletters.
For UN Watch's evaluation of the May 9, 2006 Council election results, see UN Watch Statement on the UN Human Rights Council, May 15, 2006. Our pre-election evaluation of the candidates is available here.
UN Watch led a coalition of over 40 NGOs that urged the international community to make needed improvements to the compromise text. We regret that these were not adopted. For our statements on the compromise text, see:
For our statements during the reform process as to the elements we had hoped would be included in the new Council, see:
- CNN Debate: Should Abusive Regimes Sit on the Human Rights Council?, Wednesday Watch Isssue 137, December 7, 2005.
- Civil Society Proposal for the Human Rights Council, Delivered by Hillel C. Neuer to UN Commission on Human Rights, 61st Session, November 22, 2005.
- Great Expectations, Wednesday Watch Issue 135, September 28, 2005.
- Supporting the Secretary-General's Proposed Human Rights Council, Delivered by Hillel C. Neuer to UN Commission on Human Rights, 61st Session, June 20, 2005.
- Time to Rally for Annan's Human Rights Reform, Wednesday Watch Issue 132, May 25, 2005.
- What to Do About the Commission on Human Rights? A Response to Proposals for Reform, UN Watch Panel Discussion at UN Commission on Human Rights, 61st Session, April 4, 2005.
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