Posted by Ilya Somin:
Vaclav Havel on the UN Human Rights Council:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_05_10-2009_05_16.shtml#1242249893
Few people have greater moral authority to write about human rights
issues than Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic.
In the 1970s and 80s, he led the dissident movement in then-communist
Czechoslovakia, spending several years in prison under brutal
conditions. Later, as president, he helped preside over Eastern
Europe's most successful transition to democracy and free markets. As
a bonus, Havel also wrote [1]The Power of the Powerless, perhaps the
best book on how repression operates in a totalitarian state. Thus,
it's worth paying attention to [2]his recent New York Times op ed
criticizing the United Nations Human Rights Council:
Governments seem to have forgotten the commitment made only three
short years ago to create an organization able to protect victims
and confront human rights abuses wherever they occur.
An essential precondition was better membership. The council�s
precursor, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was
folded in 2006 mainly because it had, for too long, allowed gross
violators of human rights like Sudan and Zimbabwe to block action
on their own abuses.
The council was supposed to be different. For the first time,
countries agreed to take human rights records into account when
voting for the council�s members, and those member-states that
failed to, in the words of the founding resolution, �uphold the
highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights�
would find themselves up for review and their seats endangered. For
victims of human rights abuses and advocates for human rights
worldwide, the reforms offered the hope of a credible and effective
body.
Now, it seems, principle has given way to expediency. Governments
have resumed trading votes for membership in various other United
Nations bodies, putting political considerations ahead of human
rights. The absence of competition suggests that states that care
about human rights simply don�t care enough. Latin America, a
region of flourishing democracies, has allowed Cuba to bid to renew
its membership. Asian countries have unconditionally endorsed the
five candidates running for their region�s five seats � among them,
China and Saudi Arabia.
Havel is absolutely right to criticize the UN for electing egregious
human rights abusers to the Council. Not only does the Council fail to
protect human rights, it actually promotes repression by passing
resolutions such as [3]the recent measure calling for censorship of
speech that "defames" religion.
The difficulty here goes deeper than the moral failings of individual
states that "don't care enough," highlighted by Havel. The fundamental
problem with the Council - and the entire UN system - is structural.
Most of the UN's member states are either oppressive dictatorships
themselves, or dubious quasi-democracies - states like Venezuela and
Russia that retain some democratic processes, but also routinely
resort to repression against political opponents. Such governments
have an obvious interest in blocking the creation of a UN body that
might actually curb their abuses - especially if those abuses help
their governments stay in power by crushing opposition movements. As
long as the UN's membership remains as it is, expecting the UN to
create a human rights body that actually protects human rights is much
like expecting a committee of foxes to guard a henhouse against
themselves.
This structural flaw of the UN Human Rights Council is just one facet
of the more general problem of the influence of repressive
nondemocratic regimes on international human rights law. As John
McGinnis and I discuss in [4]this forthcoming article, that influence
is broad and pervasive. Even the [5]Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, generally considered the most important international human
rights treaty, contains repression-justifying provisions inserted at
the behest of totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union.
McGinnis and I argue that this structural shortcoming of international
human rights law should lead us to be wary of allowing that law to
override the domestic law of liberal democracies. We must also be
realistic about the likelihood that international human rights law
will do much to curb repression in authoritarian states anytime soon.
References
1.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Powerless-Citizens-Against-Central-Eastern/dp/0873327616
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/opinion/11havel.html
3. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_29-2009_04_04.shtml#1238385859
4. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1116406
5. http://volokh.com/posts/1233622386.shtml
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