The UN’s Human Rights Council (HRC) on Tuesday marked the end of its disappointing first year of existence by terminating independent human-rights monitoring for Belarus and Cuba. To make matters worse, the HRC adopted two measures to continue its special scrutiny of Israel.
These actions were part of a last-minute compromise. As incredible as it may seem, the final agreement could have been even more atrocious. In the days leading up to the deal, China worked hard to weaken the council’s power in selecting nations to be monitored for human-rights violations. Fortunately, Beijing did not achieve its objectives: “It is not a perfect text, but it represents the maximum common understanding,” said the Chinese representative, Jingye Cheng.
That assessment is on the mark, though not in the way Jingye intended. The 47-member council has become another battleground between the democracies of the world and their antagonists. The compromises that have been reached are “seriously flawed,” to borrow language from the State Department’s reaction to Tuesday’s deal.
The U.S., in fact, initially refused to join the council, on the grounds that there were too many members with poor human-rights records, and now participates only as an observer. But Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has a better idea than limited involvement. On Tuesday, she announced that she will seek to cut off the $3 million of American funding for the council.
Her proposal, which will doubtlessly cause grave concern in some quarters, gives us the perfect opportunity to examine the assumptions that have guided Washington through the post-cold war period. During this time, the U.S. has sought to engage authoritarian regimes by bringing them into multilateral organizations. Our goal was to change them, or at least to attempt to enmesh them in the fabric of a liberal international order. But such governments have ended up changing these institutions more than these institutions have changed them. One need only look at the behavior of the HRC to confirm this.
As China and other such regimes continue to de-legitimize the UN and its various organs, it’s time to bring the world’s democracies together into an effective organization of their own. If President Bush can invite Putin to Kennebunkport, he also can ask the leaders of the free world to come down to Crawford for a little barbecue—and a talk about reinvigorating the Community of Democracies. Until the world’s free nations start cooperating, in a framework excluding authoritarian states and states with abominable human-rights records, we will see more appalling agreements like the one reached yesterday at the Human Rights Council.
