A new slate of human rights abusers are poised to be elected by the UN General Assembly to the UN's top human rights body. The candidates have been announced and the fix is in.
Membership on the UN Human Rights Council currently includes such human rights luminaries as: China, Cote d'Ivoire, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. When the election takes place in October, they will be joined - at a minimum - by notorious human rights violators, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola.
The election of these states - both ranked by Freedom House in the lowest possible category of human rights protection ("not free") - is a done deal because of a deliberate UN process. UN regional groups are enabled to put forward fixed slates, whereby the number of states running is equal to the number of seats that the regional group has been allotted. The result is a guaranteed spot. Angola and the DRC are part of the African regional group's fixed slate.
The Asian regional group is presenting voters - the 193 member states of the General Assembly - with a lose-lose result. The five states running for the four available seats in this group are Afghanistan, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Qatar. So we know for certain, therefore, that one of the two human rights paragons Afghanistan or Qatar - also ranked "not free" by Freedom House - will be elected. The victors are elected by a majority vote of the UN member states (although a 2/3 vote is required to remove a Human Rights Council member who commits gross and systematic violations of human rights).
The UN system is rigged to allow human rights abusers to sit in judgement about human rights abuse because there are no pre-conditions for membership on the Council, requisites that would entail actually protecting human rights.
Instead, the UN procedure asks candidates, nicely, to promise to behave. They call it a pledging system. In fact, many are elected without even producing a pledge. The pledges that are received from the worst of the worst are shameless. For this year's elections, pledges have been received, for instance, from Afghanistan, Angola and Qatar.
Qatar's pledge includes: "The promotion and protection of human rights is one of the policy pillars of the State of Qatar." They claim they have "a constitutional and legislative system that embodies the principles of human rights and fundamental freedoms, and respects and protects everyone." Moreover, "the state of Qatar...respects freedom of expression and judicial independence."
More accurately, according to the latest State Department human rights report: "The principal human rights problems were the inability of citizens to choose their government in free and fair periodic elections...The monarch-appointed government prohibited organized political parties and restricted civil liberties, including freedoms of speech, press, and assembly...Legal, institutional, and cultural discrimination against women limited their participation in society."
Afghanistan's pledge, produced as a slick 16-page color production that is short on words but has lots of color photos of dancing children, smiling women and flying birds, assures: "since 2001, Afghanistan has moved towards the progressive realization of human rights values and principles."
Actually, as the State Department reports: "The most significant human rights problems were... torture and abuse of detainees by government forces; widespread disregard for the rule of law and little accountability for those who committed human rights abuses; and targeted violence and endemic societal discrimination against women and girls."
Angola pledges it is "fulfilling its commitments to advancing human rights, consistent with its constitutional provisions, which broadly embrace the values and principles of democracy and...fundamental freedoms..."
The people of Angola might beg to disagree, if they could get out of prison. As the State Department's most recent report says: "The three most important human rights abuses were cruel, excessive, and degrading punishment, including reported cases of torture and beatings; limits on freedoms of assembly, association, speech, and press; and official corruption and impunity. Other human rights abuses included arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life; harsh and potentially life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention..."
The real question to be asked, however, is not why human rights abusing states lie, feign interest in human right protection, or want to legitimize their regimes via the UN. The question is why the world's leading democracy, the United States, is willing to sit side-by-side with them as equals and serve as their legitimizers.
The Trump administration took over membership on the Council after President Obama obtained a three-year term for the United States that began on January 1, 2017. With this first Human Rights Council election since he came into office, the President has been handed the opportunity - and the responsibility - to resign, effective immediately.