Politics Undermine Human Rights Council

Decision to terminate monitoring of war crimes in Yemen exposed the need to restructure the UNHRC so it is more shielded from petty political concerns

Greetings, readers!

With this newsletter, I finally end the four-month hiatus I unexpectedly went on. Thank you to all of you out there for waiting patiently, and my apologies for the unexpected absence. Newsletters may remain irregular for a bit, but I expect to get back to regular editions soon.

For today, I wanted to focus on the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). On October 14, a ceremonial election was held for eighteen open spots on the UNHRC. It was ceremonial since only eighteen countries were running so there was no actual election, and all the candidates were automatically elected.

In January 2022, those 18 countries will be seated on the 47-seat council. Those countries are:

·        Argentina

·        Benin

·        Cameroon

·        Eritrea

·        Finland

·        Gambia

·        Honduras

·        India

·        Kazakhstan

·        Lithuania

·        Luxembourg

·        Malaysia

·        Montenegro

·        Paraguay

·        Qatar

·        Somalia

·        United Arab Emirates

·        United States of America

People with different points of view will point to different countries on that list as problematic due to their own human rights records. The fact is, it’s pretty much impossible to assemble a 47-member council that isn’t dominated by human rights violators, regardless of which of the five regional groups (African States, Asia-Pacific States, Eastern European States, Latin American and Caribbean States and Western European and other States) they’re from.

This is not just a matter of hypocrisy, although that is a serious concern for a body that cannot possibly do any good without being recognized as legitimate by most of the world.

But it also severely impacts the actions and decisions of the UNHRC. We recently saw a very concerning example of how self-interested politics dictate the decisions of the council.

On October 7, by a narrow 21-18 margin, the UNHRC decided against renewing the mandate of the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen (GEE). The GEE had been tasked with investigating war crimes committed during the ongoing fighting that has decimated the already impoverished country of Yemen.

The decision itself is tragic. In December 2020, the UN estimated that the war had caused 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 from “indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure.” The UN High Commission for Refugees says that over 4 million Yemenis have been displaced as a result of this war, and “Half of Yemen’s health facilities are shuttered or destroyed and years of economic decline and institutional collapse are pushing the country to the brink of a large-scale famine, with half a million people living in famine-like conditions and at least 16 million more facing significant risk of going hungry in 2021.”

Despite the fact that this suffering continues and that no one doubts that atrocities and war crimes are still occurring in Yemen, the UNHRC terminated their investigation in Yemen. This action was the result of an intense lobbying campaign by Saudi Arabia. Although Saudi Arabia is not a member of the UNHRC at this time, Bahrain, a close ally, is, and they led the charge for this vote.

There’s no honest case to be made that the GEE’s mandate should have been terminated. The Bahraini ambassador said that the GEE "contributed to spreading misinformation about the situation on the ground" in Yemen but there is no evidence to support this threadbare claim.

No, this was simply Saudi Arabia using its influence and lobbying with all its might to prevent the GEE mandate from being renewed.

As this incident demonstrates, political interests undermine attempts to enforce human rights norms or even monitor for abuses. And it is not only direct actions like those of Saudi Arabia that cause the problems.

The United States will be rejoining the UNHRC in January. The Trump administration had withdrawn the US in June 2018 over what it called “chronic bias against Israel.” Ironically, the administration of Barack Obama had worked, with moderate success, to diminish the focus on Israel at the UNHRC. Trump’s withdrawal ended that effort.

Where non-governmental human rights organizations such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch can be legitimately defended against accusations of bias by arguing that they are not political bodies (greater media exposure and hysterical reactions by pro-Israel advocates draw vastly more attention to their criticisms of Israeli war crimes, creating the false impression that they are especially focused on Israel. But they level accusations against most of the major nation-states around the world), the UNHRC can make no such claim.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and siege on Gaza, along with other human rights violations that are necessarily characteristic of an apartheid regime, constitute  the only country-specific, permanent item on the UNHRC agenda. And that is not because they are somehow worse than other war crimes.

Rather, Israel’s occupation is the one issue that a sufficient number of states can agree to permanently monitor. Without the inordinate weight of the United States that protects Israel from the consequences of its policies in the UN Security Council and other consequential international arenas, many states find this issue to be low-hanging fruit.

But that should not be the reason that Israel should be condemned for its behavior. It should face consequences for its abuse of human rights norms, its brazen defiance of international law, and its destabilizing and reckless regional policies. The problem is that is not how the UNHRC operates. Politics, not the rule of law or international human rights standards, guide these decisions.

As a result, pro-apartheid forces which are constantly circling the UN like buzzards, are given ammunition for their disingenuous arguments of anti-Israel bias by a unique focus on israel’s crimes that sets it apart from other major human rights violators. Meanwhile, the effect of the UNHRC reports and declarations on Israeli policies is virtually nil.

The state structure we live under makes it impossible for a council consisting of individual states to equitably, or even reasonably, adjudicate human rights violations. No country has clean hands regarding human rights and while the circumstances of any given moment in history may cast one country as less of a human rights violator than another, virtually every state has some interest in seeing some war crimes prosecuted but not others. It largely depends on the relationship between the voting country and the accused. It’s the nature of international affairs.

It is futile to pretend that politics can be disconnected and self-defeating to try to maintain that façade. Yet, while member states are unsuitable judges of a human rights doctrine, the United Nations remains the indispensable forum for international law and the protection of human rights. This is a very difficult tension to manage.

There is no perfect solution, and even a reasonable improvement in this state of affairs will take time. But a good place to start is reforming the UN human rights structure. The UNHRC is one part of that structure, which is needlessly complicated, due to a combination of factors including bodies being created by various different treaties and covenants, political considerations, and bureaucratic mechanisms.

In reforming it, bodies such as the UNHRC should be replaced by committees of human rights experts and international law scholars from around the world, which are empowered to work with the Security Council (itself a body in dire need of restructuring, but that’s a larger, and separate discussion) and the international legal system to create a stronger and clearer body of human rights laws and the coercive power to enforce it.

While the participation of member states in forming such bodies is inevitable, the process can be set up in a way that would limit political influence and create a system that places much greater emphasis on expertise in human rights and international law.

For now, we can be assured that the Biden administration will go all in on the UNHRC in defense of Israel and to protect its own interests. It will be important to keep in mind that the US has ling led the fight against an international legal system with teeth, even while it also leads in empty rhetoric supporting human rights. It will be up to us to raise our voices.

But those voices need not be defending the deeply flawed and often counter-productive UNHRC. Rather, they should be calling for a human rights regime that pursues its claims against the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, the UK, France, Iran, Venezuela, the UAE, North Korea, and any other violators of human rights with equal fervor regardless of political concerns or ideological stances.

Recent Articles

A few select pieces from the past four months.

I did a post-mortem on the Benjamin Netanyahu era for Responsible Statecraft.

For +972 Magazine, I wrote a piece arguing that we should welcome attempts to legislate actions against Ben & Jerry’s for their decision to stop selling ice cream in settlements. [Unfortunately, the pro-apartheid zealots seemed to recognize this themselves, and this looks like more bluff than anything else, at least for now]

I did a deep dive on the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism at ReThinking Foreign Policy.

I looked at new Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s meeting with Joe Biden for Responsible Statecraft.

And I took a look at the recent drama in the House of Representatives over additional funding for Israel’s Iron Dome system.

Lastly, ReThinking Foreign Policy was one among over 40 organizations which helped launch the #NoTechForApartheid Campaign last week. Check it out and please support it if you can.

Recommended Reading

How the ADL’s Israel Advocacy Undermines Its Civil Rights Work, by Alex Kane and Jacob Hutt, Jewish Currents, Spring 2021

What I would’ve told the Knesset about settler violence — if they’d let me, by Ali Awad, +972 Magazine, October 15, 2021

Saudi-Iran Rapprochement Was Unthinkable Under Trump’s Blank Check to the Kingdom, by Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept, October 15, 2021

No end in sight for civilian-military crisis in Sudan, by Mohamed Saied, Al-Monitor, October 15, 2021

Band of 30 militant Israeli Squatters attack Palestinian Farmers, Steal Olive Harvest in continued Sabotage that has seen 1 mn Olive Trees destroyed by Israelis since 1967, by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, October 16, 2021

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