House Wants to Withhold Dues to U.N.

With the outcome a foregone conclusion, the House votes today on withholding $244 million in unpaid U.N. dues to pressure the world body to put Washington back on its human rights commission.

The expected action escalates a bizarre dispute in which Congress and the United Nations each seems determined to hurt the other by inflicting wounds on themselves.

By what is expected to be a nearly unanimous vote, the House will attach an amendment to the State Department’s authorization bill withholding next year’s final installment in a compromise plan to pay off $926 million in U.N. dues. The money had gone unpaid in an earlier dispute over U.N. finances.

The amendment, sponsored by House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Tom Lantos of San Mateo, permits the payment only if the United States has been restored to the U.N. Human Rights Commission. In a secret ballot last week, Washington lost the seat on the panel it had held since the commission was established more than half a century ago.

The conflict is rich in irony. Congress is applying economic muscle to reverse a vote that was overtly democratic. And some U.N. members sought to embarrass the United States by voting it off the commission, thereby undermining the credibility of the U.N.’s own human rights program.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan complained about the House’s plan Wednesday, saying that “punishing all 189 member states would be counterproductive, and punishing the bureaucracy would be unfair.”

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said President Bush objects to the House plan. But House staff members said lawmakers are determined to vent their anger, regardless of the administration’s wishes.

“While the United States is disappointed with the results of the Human Rights Commission election, the president feels strongly that this issue should not be linked to the payment of our arrears to the U.N. and other international organizations,” Fleischer said.

In a vote organized by the 54-nation U.N. Economic and Social Council, the United States finished fourth in a race for three seats reserved for Western countries on the rights panel.

At the same time, the council awarded seats to Sudan--regarded by most nongovernmental human rights organizations as one of the world’s worst abusers of religious and political rights--as well as Syria and Cuba.

“Some of the world’s premier human rights violators are now prominent members of the human rights commission,” Hyde said. “In a clear voice, we must express our disapproval of this outrage and work to restore some credibility to this agency.”

Even staunch backers of the U.N. said the vote undercut the moral authority of the panel.

“It is absolutely regrettable that the United States has lost its vote in the U.N. commission on human rights,” said Phyllis Cuttino, vice president of the Better World Campaign, an advocacy group supporting the world organization. “There are members of the commission that have actually been the subject of commission resolutions--for instance, Cuba.”

But some countries jumped on the vote as a way to punish Washington for perceived arrogance. On the same day it lost its seat on the rights commission, the United States also was voted off a panel dealing with international narcotics issues.

“The United States is always willing to pluck the fruit from the tree but is not willing to plant the seeds and water them,” said one member of an Arab delegation to the U.N., who did not want to be named because only the country’s ambassador can speak for the record. “If they don’t pay their dues again, they should not be surprised next year when they have another bad season. They must learn that they reap what they sow.”

One Western diplomat whose country voted for the United States in the human rights panel balloting said the U.S. mission to the United Nations--which has lacked a permanent chief since January--failed to run a credible race for a panel seat.

Despite the rhetoric, there were strong hints that today’s action will prove to be mostly symbolic. U.N. supporters hope to strip the amendment out of the final version of the bill in a conference with the Senate.

Moreover, Democratic staff members said the Hyde-Lantos amendment was a compromise to prevent a vote on a measure advocated by anti-U.N. Republicans, which would also have withheld a $582-million payment scheduled to be made soon.

“The vote to exclude the United States from the [commission] last week was outrageous and only damaged the institution and undermined the cause of human rights worldwide,” Lantos said. “We should not compound the damage by withholding the bulk of our arrears payments to the United Nations.”

Nevertheless, administration officials said the House vote will damage U.S. diplomacy. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said passage of the House measure “would be extremely damaging to our ability to cooperate in multilateral organizations.”

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Times staff writer Maggie Farley at the United Nations contributed to this report.