Center for International Policy

Posted March 31 2006

Keeping gross violators off new council

By Wayne S. Smith

On March 15, the United Nations General Assembly, by an overwhelming vote of 170-4, approved the creation of a new Human Rights Council, to replace the old, discredited Human Rights Commission. The U.S. was one of four members to vote against (along with Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau).

Why was the U.S. opposed? Our representative to the U.N., John Bolton, explained that the U.S. felt the proposed criteria to keep gross abusers off the new council were simply not strong enough. Among other things, he said, members should be elected by a two-thirds majority, rather than the simple majority called for by the new proposal. What was needed, he said, was a council that ensured doing "all we could do" to promote human rights. "There should be no place on the new council for countries where there is objective evidence of systematic and gross violations of human rights, or where United Nations sanctions have been applied for human rights violations," Bolton declared.

I'm sure we'd all agree with that statement. If the new council is to have credibility, it must not have gross violators among its members, and not among its founding members.

But where then does that leave the United States? After the flood of well-documented reports in major U.S. dailies and journals of the widespread torture and even murder of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo over a period of years, must not the U.S. itself now be considered a gross violator?

So far, the Bush administration has responded to these myriad charges only with the usual unconvincing denials. "We don't torture people," it says, even in the face of massive evidence that it does exactly that.

And, incredibly, as though to confirm that it is engaged in such practices, in March, government lawyers insisted that Sen. John McCain's amendment to ban cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees did not apply to those held at Guantanamo!

Oh?! So are the government lawyers saying that cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees at Guantanamo is OK and should continue at Guantanamo? If not, why insist that the McCain amendment doesn't apply there?

And now there is even a U.N. report calling for the closing of Guantanamo because of the gross abuses there -- a call seconded by the European Parliament, by many governments around the world, by the Vatican, by our own Council of Churches, and by various human rights organizations. The U.N. has called on us to close Guantanamo. The Bush administration, in effect, stands in defiance of that admonition.

In light of all this, how could the United States possibly be accepted as a founding member of the new Human Rights Council? Its membership could only undermine the credibility of the new council. It would signal that even with the new council, hypocrisy is to remain the modus operandi.

For an American, it is difficult and painful to say the United States should be excluded from the Human Rights Council. After all, we had a long and proud record of promoting and defending human rights -- until the Bush administration. But now we need to face reality and insist upon a return to that tradition.

Here, I am in total sympathy with Joseph W. DuRocher of Orlando, a former helicopter pilot in the U.S. Navy, who recently sent his wings and shoulder boards to President Bush. "Until your administration," he wrote in a letter on www.truthout.org, "I thought it impossible for our nation to take hundreds of persons into custody without provable charges of any kind, and to `disappear' them into holes like Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram … I do not want these things done in my name … [T]o remain silent is to let you think I appove or support your actions. I do not. I am saddened to give up my wings and bars … But I hate the torture and death you have caused more than I value their symbolism. Giving them up makes me cry for my beloved country."

Amen.

Wayne S. Smith, a Marine veteran of the Korean War and former U.S. diplomat, is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C.