THE OPPENHEIMER REPORT
U.N. panel flunks test on Cuba
By Andres Oppenheimer
Making a mockery of its mission to investigate human-rights abuses
around the world, the new United Nations Human Rights Council --
presided over by Mexico -- has decided to stop looking into rights
abuses in Cuba.
Before getting into the Geneva, Switzerland-based council's overall
performance, and into whether Mexico is retreating from its commitment
to universal human rights, let's take a quick look at the council's
agreements at the end of its first annual session this week.
At midnight on Monday, the council -- created last year to replace what
the United Nations itself now describes as its ''discredited'' previous
Human Rights Commission -- agreed on rules that will govern it.
There had been a bitter fight between a group of dictatorships led by
China and a group of Western democracies led by Germany about whether
the council should maintain its 40 mandates to look into specific
countries or issues, such as Cuba, or violence against women.
China and its allies wanted to scrap all mandates for countries
altogether, while maintaining the mandates for issues. Germany and
Canada wanted to keep both sets of mandates intact.
In the end, the council's outgoing president, Mexican ambassador to the
U.N. Luis Alfonso de Alba, proposed a compromise agreement by which all
special mandates will continue, except for two countries -- Cuba and
Belarus. The full package, which included leaving out these two
countries, was accepted by consensus.
''It's certainly a setback,'' said Peggy Hicks, a top official of the
Human Rights Watch monitoring group, referring to the two countries'
exclusion. ``It's not justifiable in any sense based on the human-rights
record of those countries.''
Not surprisingly, the Cuban regime hailed the council's decision Tuesday
as a ''historic victory.'' An article in Cuba's official daily Granma
said that ``a long battle of 20 years has reached a happy ending today
in the new U.N. Human Rights Council, which monitored Cuba from a biased
point of view.''
The article quoted a ''visibly satisfied'' Mexican ambassador De Alba as
hailing the overall results of the body's first year as ''a decision of
historic dimensions'' that will mark ``the start of a new culture in the
treatment of human rights.''
COMPROMISE
Hmmm. On Wednesday, I called De Alba and asked him whether discontinuing
the council's investigations into Cuba's human-rights abuses -- which
had been led by French jurist Christine Chanet -- should be something
the human-rights community should be celebrating.
''I think you need to consider the alternatives we were facing: We had
40 mandates, of which 12 were country specific, and of those 40 we have
preserved 38,'' De Alba told me from his office in Geneva. ``The end
result was highly positive: If we had voted on a case-by-case basis, we
may have ended up with only half of the . . . mandates.''
I then asked De Alba whether he had issued his proposed package
resolution as an independent council president or as Mexico's ambassador
to the U.N. in Geneva. Hours earlier, a well-placed human-rights
advocate in Mexico had told me that De Alba's proposal marks a shift in
Mexico's foreign policy, away from its previous commitment to human rights.
''The system works in a somewhat ambiguous way: I don't cease to be
Mexico's envoy to Geneva, but I can't represent national positions as a
council president,'' De Alba told me. He said that while he represented
all council members as president, another Mexican diplomat represented
his country at the session.
SAME OLD THING
My opinion: I would love to buy the idea that scrapping investigations
into Cuba and Belarus was the price to pay for a renovated Human Rights
Council that will from now on look into rights abuses no matter where
they take place. And I would love to think that De Alba was acting as a
council consensus-builder, rather than reflecting a shift in Mexico's
foreign policy.
But judging from the elated reaction of Cuba's dictatorship, and the
skepticism of prominent human-rights groups, I fear that the new council
will be just like its predecessor -- a mutual protection club dominated
by the world's worst human-rights offenders.
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