Abusers in charge

SCORE ONE FOR the torturers, ethnic cleansers and despots. The new and improved United Nations Human Rights Council, which was created to replace the widely discredited Human Rights Commission, has after a year in existence proved to be nearly as worthless as its predecessor.

The council met this week in Geneva to draft rules on how to conduct its work. Its main accomplishments were as follows: Cuba and Belarus were removed from the list of 12 countries subject to special investigation by the council -- not because of any improvement in their dismal human rights records but because of objections by some of the many other human rights abusers on the panel, led by China, to the monitoring process itself. Israel was singled out as the only country whose human rights record will be a permanent item on the council’s agenda. Investigations of the ongoing genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region were allowed to gather dust. And Libya -- a nation that awarded its annual Moammar Kadafi Human Rights Prize in 2002 to Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, and that detains women for the social crime of being rape victims -- was named to head an anti-racism panel that will convene in 2009.

The United States played no part in any of these decisions because, in a fit of pique after its suggestions on how to reform the old commission were rejected last year, it declined to seek a seat on the new council. Then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton had sought to make it harder for abusive countries to become members by requiring a two-thirds vote by the General Assembly. When his obstructionism threatened to derail the entire reform process and keep the old commission in place, this page urged the U.N. to proceed with the best compromise it could get.

That compromise is now looking like a rotten deal. Bolton was right about one thing: The U.N. can’t possibly monitor human rights abuses when those doing the monitoring are themselves abusers. Yet what doubtless never occurred to the former ambassador is that the U.S. is in a singularly bad position to preach about such matters to the rest of the world, given that it is itself a human rights abuser and probably wouldn’t qualify for a seat on the council under Bolton’s own criteria.

As long as the U.S. continues to deny due process of law to “enemy combatants” detained indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, and as long as it commits extrajudicial kidnappings of terrorism suspects and ships them to countries known to torture detainees, it will remain guilty of cruel and tyrannical behavior. The U.S. would be in a much better position to assert its views on human rights if it weren’t so clearly violating its own principles. Once we have our own house in order, we can get on with the important business of fixing what’s wrong with the Human Rights Council.