Behind the human rights mask.(Goodbye to the U.N.)

Readers of The American, Enterprise may have been a little surprised when the United Nations Human Rights Commission failed to pass a resolution condemning Cuba at its 59th annual session in Geneva last March and April. After all, the Castro dictatorship had arrested nearly 80 journalists, librarians, and human rights activists literally days before, and sentenced them behind closed doors to prison sentences as long as 25 years. When the U.N. Economic and Social Council meeting in New York a few days later actually voted to re-elect Cuba as a member of the Human Rights Commission, instead of the object of one of its investigations, any reasonable observer might have been strained.

In my own case, however, the reaction to both events was somewhat muted. I knew what to expect--for I had been a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission's Geneva meetings. After that experience, nothing the U.N. does will be capable of shocking me.

In the first place, the Commission (like the U.N. itself) is home to some of the world's most unsavory regimes. No less than 53 countries are represented on the HRC. The membership was arrayed in concentric ovals in Geneva, and, amazingly, the inner oval consisted of outright police states: countries like Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Colonel Qaddafi's Libya (which, almost amusingly, currently chairs the Human Rights Commission). The next oval outward grouped together countries slightly less objectionable but who often vote with the first group--India, Pakistan, most of the African countries, plus odd ducks like Colonel Chavez's Venezuela. The third oval is made up of most of the Latin American republics plus South Africa, and (on some issues) small European countries like Ireland or Belgium--who are currently trying out for the role of Progressive Conscience of Humanity. They sometimes vote with the Western democracies, but are generally unreliable. Both Argentina and Brazil abstained on this year's Cuban resolution--one that didn't even condemn the Castro regime but merely begged the dictator to allow a representative of the Commission in to "evaluate" the situation. South Africa likewise managed to to kill a resolution on Zimbabwe because, whatever his sins, dictator Robert Mugabe is, after all, black. (So are his victims--a point Pretoria chooses to overlook.)

The fourth oval encompasses the only countries that have any right to be there at all the democracies built on genuine individual rights: the Western European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. These are in a distinct minority and have to do some powerful horse trading with the second and third ovals just to maintain a grasp on the agenda.

As long as the Commission is allowed to be this large, and refuses to impose any real-world tests for membership (does the country in question actually respect human rights itself?), it is simply naive to expect anything productive of this organization.

A second reason not to expect much of U.N. ...