Behind the Human Rights Mask
By Mark Falcoff

Cuba is hitting the headlines as Fidel Castro, recovering from surgery, entrusts leadership to his brother, Raul. Is needed change on the horizon? In December 2003, scholar Mark Falcoff wrote for TAE about the irony of Cuba’s election to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Readers of The American Enterprise may have been a little surprised when the United Nations Human Rights Commission failed to pass a resolution condemning Cuba at its 59th annual session in Geneva last March and April. After all, the Castro dictatorship had arrested nearly 80 journalists, librarians, and human rights activists literally days before, and sentenced them behind closed doors to prison sentences as long as 25 years.

When the U.N. Economic and Social Council meeting in New York a few days later actually voted to re-elect Cuba as a member of the Human Rights Commission, instead of the object of one of its investigations, any reasonable observer might have been stunned.

In my own case, however, the reaction to both events was somewhat muted. I knew what to expect--for I had been a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s Geneva meetings. After that experience, nothing the U.N. does will be capable of shocking me.

In the first place, the Commission (like the U.N. itself) is home to some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. No less than 53 countries are represented on the HRC. The membership was arrayed in concentric ovals in Geneva, and, amazingly, the inner oval consisted of outright police states: countries like Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya (which, almost amusingly, currently chairs the Human Rights Commission). The next oval outward grouped together countries slightly less objectionable but who often vote with the first group--India, Pakistan, most of the African countries, plus odd ducks like Colonel Ch‡vez’s Venezuela. The third oval is made up of most of the Latin American republics plus South Africa, and (on some issues) small European countries like Ireland or Belgium--who are currently trying out for the role of Progressive Conscience of Humanity. They sometimes vote with the Western democracies, but are generally unreliable. Both Argentina and Brazil abstained on this year’s Cuban resolution--one that didn’t even condemn the Castro regime but merely begged the dictator to allow a representative of the Commission in to “evaluate” the situation. South Africa likewise managed to kill a resolution on Zimbabwe because, whatever his sins, dictator Robert Mugabe is, after all, black. (So are his victims--a point Pretoria chooses to overlook.)

The fourth oval encompasses the only countries that have any right to be there at all--the democracies built on genuine individual rights: the Western European countries, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. These are in a distinct minority and have to do some powerful horse trading with the second and third ovals just to maintain a grasp on the agenda.

As long as the Commission is allowed to be this large, and refuses to impose any real-world tests for membership (does the country in question actually respect human rights itself?), it is simply naive to expect anything productive of this organization.

A second reason not to expect much of U.N. bodies like this is that in the world of the United Nations, what are called economic and social rights are supposedly given equal weight to civil and political rights (although in practice the latter are most often treated as an expensive luxury that nobody really needs). In U.N.- speak, the “rights” that are regarded as fundamental are airy ones like the “right” to food, the “right” to adequate housing, the “right” to clean air and clean water, the “right” to proper disposal of toxic wastes, and so forth. By clogging the agenda with such practical issues, the Third World countries deflect attention from their prisons and torture chambers. Their selective terminology allows them to sit in judgment on Western countries.After all, their constitutions declare the “right to food”--does yours?

Third, from the United Nations point of view, human rights are advanced only to the degree to which vast bureaucracies are created and expanded. If there is a problem, the U.N. proposes to create tax-free jobs for bureaucrats and politicians (mostly from undemocratic states), paid for largely by the “rich” countries. If you balk at this, that proves “you don’t care about human rights.” If you do pony up the cash, somehow human rights are being advanced--regardless of the actual situation on the ground.

Fourth, far too much time is devoted to letting the so-called Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have their say. Most of these are not really non-governmental in any meaningful sense. Some, like the Federation of Cuban Women, are actually state propaganda organs. Others are financed by the U.N. or the European Union, or individual European governments. Many others are creatures of regional bodies like the Arab League. I would estimate that speechifying from such groups takes up roughly 35 to 40 percent of the time of U.N. agencies. This has concrete economic consequences, because the translators earn $300 an hour, and there are five official languages at the U.N., which means every speech has to be translated in 25 different directions. The United States pays for 23 percent of the costs of this. The length of the sessions—and the corresponding bill--could be drastically reduced by eliminating NGO pontificating, which adds nothing whatever to the deliberations.

Fifth and finally, it is distressing to see how deeply our own State Department is committed to quixotic ventures like the U.N. Human Rights Commission--apparently unfazed by its membership, its leadership, most of all, its failure to focus seriously on real human rights violations. Too many of our diplomats, like diplomats everywhere, seem to be fascinated by process. Some even seem distressingly anxious to win the approval of thugs and murderers. As one told me,“if there are 190 countries in the world and they all vote against you, maybe you’re wrong.” I found myself replying to him somewhat tartly that overwhelming sentiment can’t change the facts of a matter.

I don’t think I’ll be invited back next year.


Mark Falcoff is a Latin American specialist at the American Enterprise Institute.

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