United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a host of
ministers will be in Europe for the inaugural gathering of the new
Human Rights Council and a conference on disarmament in Geneva
today.
Much of the initial two-week session of the 47-state body will
be devoted to planning future work, but its chairman ambassador
Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico has set aside time for examining
current rights crises around the world.
The latter will be a test of whether the new body is ready to
break out of the confrontational and highly politicized atmosphere
often pitting developed nations against developing that hampered
the commission, diplomats and activists say.
"The new Human Rights Council must be more than the
dysfunctional old commission by another name," said Peggy Hicks,
global advocacy director at the US-based Human Rights Watch.
"The new members must... find new and more effective ways to
help the victims of human rights violations across the globe," she
added in a statement.
But the council, intended to spearhead a series of UN reforms,
had a difficult birth, with the United States declining to stand
for membership because it said that changes to the old commission
did not go deep enough.
Unlike the commission, whose 53 members were nominated by
regional blocs, those wanting to take part in the council had to
win a majority in the UN General Assembly.
Washington backed Annan's initial call for a two-thirds vote,
which it said would help keep out abusers who had been able to join
forces within the commission to bloc effective action against
violations.
But rights activists say that with the storm of international
criticism over Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centres, as
well as alleged secret prisons, it was far from certain that
Washington would have won election.
One of the other key changes is that the rights records of all
members will be periodically reviewed. It will be the job of the
council to decide how this will be done.
China has warned that there must be no return to the
finger-pointing of the past.
(China Daily June 19, 2006)
