Engaging the Human Rights Council

Engagement has been a watchword of the Obama administration, and at the United Nations this policy has been most evident at the Human Rights Council, the Geneva-based body charged with assessing human rights around the world. The Bush administration spurned the body, citing its suspect membership and evident bias against Israel. By contrast, the Obama administration sought and won a seat on the council.

Assessments of the council’s recent work therefore are politically freighted — its performance can be seen as a test case for the Obama engagement policy. Last week, Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute fired several broadsides. In effect, she charged that the council’s work remains as skewed as ever and that the Obama administration has had to resort to rhetorical and procedural gymnastics to show any progress at all. She also accuses the administration of trimming statements and speeches to suit different audiences.

The U.S. State Department has now adopted a practice honed by Israel’s Arab negotiating partners – saying different things to different audiences.  The State Department is distributing for American consumption speeches that it claims were delivered in Israel’s defense at the recent session of the U.N. Human Rights Council.  But the remarks American diplomats actually delivered to the U.N. audience, which President Obama so desperately seeks to impress, were strikingly different.

I spoke today to Suzanne Nossel, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations and former chief operating officer for Human Rights Watch. She conceded that the HRC retains a "structural bias" against Israel but argued that the administration has made countering it a priority.

We spend a great deal of time talking about the importance of bringing a more balanced and constructive perspective to the work on Israel. We spend a lot of time talking to Israel about how bset to deal with what we consider to be a very unconstructive approach by the Council. It’s a serious concern during every single session. 

She chalks up any differences between prepared and as-delivered speeches to the normal discretion that ambassadors have to depart slightly from prepared texts. More fundamentally, she argues that a central element of the administration’s policy has been placing on the Council’s agenda a slew of initiatives and issues that might otherwise be neglected in what she refers to as the body’s "relentless overemphasis on Israel."  

As evidence of progress, she cited a number of Council actions, including the creation of a new special rapporteur on freedom of association, the renewal (by a larger margin than previously) of the mandate to review Sudan’s human rights record, a new high-profile inquiry into the June violence in Kyrgyzstan, and Iran’s failure to secure a seat. But Nossel was reluctant to proffer empirical support for the idea that the Council’s time and energy has been less focused on Israel than in the past and she acknowledged that continuing fallout from the Goldstone report and the flotilla investigation consumed plenty of council time. 

For her part, Bayefsky does not seem inclined to engage in a fair accounting, or much of an accounting at all of the Council’s work. In her eyes, the resolutions critical of Israel assume towering, menacing proportions whereas those that defend core American values get a passing reference at best. That odd calculus produces ringing, but ultimately unconvincing perorations.

So. as President Obama would say, let us be clear. This administration’s message is that demonizing Israelis is a price worth paying for the sake of other people’s human rights… Legitimizing the Human Rights Council with American membership and financial support is justified regardless of the threat that it poses to the safety and security of the Jewish people. The Obama administration ought to know better.  Equality and human dignity cannot be built on the inequality of the few.   

Her point about U.S. legitimization of the body is the crux of the argument against engagement, and I asked Nossel about it.

When we object and make our objections known that we can preserve our position. The simple fact that we’re present in the room doesn’t mean that we endorse everything that happens. We’ve always been present at the U.N. General Assembly… we certainly haven’t agreed over the years with everything that’s gone on there but we’ve always been present and I think it’s always been understood that on Israel issues and on issues like free speech that we take  exception to some of the actions of that body. I don’t think that’s lost on anyone. Whether we’re there or not, initiatives move forward, the norm-setting process moves forward, and we have to deal with consequences of that around the globe. 

But this avoids the issue of whether the United States’ presence legitimates Council output that the U.S. opposes. It’s hard to trumpet select council achievements that enjoyed U.S. support (some passed over the objections of many states) while simultaneously denying that the U.S. presence gives at least a modest boost to initiatives that Washington opposes. If simply opposing a resolution shelters a country from its impact, then surely the United States can’t place much value on its victories on issues like Sudan. 

To my mind, Nossel’s latter point is the decisive one. The gradual, cumulative process of norm-setting continues whether the United States chooses to avert its eyes or not. This is particularly the case now, as China and other emerging powers begin to convert their economic clout into other forms of influence, including normative influence. China offers a strong, if still inchoate, competing ideology that prioritizes sovereignty and economic development over traditional human rights. For all its gaps and dysfunctionalities, the world’s current human rights architecture is remarkably consistent with U.S. values. And the United States needs to be on site, defending what it — more than any other country — has built.