Monday, May 11, 2009
Three cheers once again for Vaclav Havel, a champion of Human Rights who hasn't lost the thread:
IMAGINE an election where the results are largely preordained and a number of candidates are widely recognized as unqualified. Any supposedly democratic ballot conducted in this way would be considered a farce. Yet tomorrow the United Nations General Assembly will engage in just such an "election" when it votes to fill the vacancies on the 47-member Human Rights Council.
Only 20 countries are running for 18 open seats. The seats are divided among the world's five geographic regions and three of the five regions have presented the same number of candidates as there are seats, thus ensuring there is no opportunity to choose the best proponents of human rights each region has to offer.
Governments seem to have forgotten the commitment made only three short years ago to create an organization able to protect victims and confront human rights abuses wherever they occur.
An essential precondition was better membership. The council's precursor, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, was folded in 2006 mainly because it had, for too long, allowed gross violators of human rights like Sudan and Zimbabwe to block action on their own abuses.
The council was supposed to be different. For the first time, countries agreed to take human rights records into account when voting for the council's members, and those member-states that failed to, in the words of the founding resolution, "uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights" would find themselves up for review and their seats endangered. For victims of human rights abuses and advocates for human rights worldwide, the reforms offered the hope of a credible and effective body.
Now, it seems, principle has given way to expediency. Governments have resumed trading votes for membership in various other United Nations bodies, putting political considerations ahead of human rights. The absence of competition suggests that states that care about human rights simply don't care enough. Latin America, a region of flourishing democracies, has allowed Cuba to bid to renew its membership. Asian countries have unconditionally endorsed the five candidates running for their region's five seats -- among them, China and Saudi Arabia...
Of course it's inevitable because the United Nations is based upon a fallacy -- it is systemically flawed. You simply can't put a room full of non-democracies in a room, give them votes, and pretend the results will come out as representative of anything an American would recognize as serving the higher good. Even placing a group of Democracies around the table will simply result in a round of power and influence-currying.
Rousseau posited that the valid practice of democratic representatives required the derivation of law and the performing of governance based on something called "The General Will." It's a sort of vague principle that calls upon representatives to set aside faction and special interest and make decisions based upon common interests in line with the Social Contract. The trouble is, there is not now, nor is there ever likely to be a world-wide consensus of what the General Will of the world is. Things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights may be argued to be an attempt to derive such a will, but the problem is that even many of the signatories consider it only so much paper (and considered it so when they signed it), nor can any despotism ever be trusted to live up to such higher standards. Our own political system has strayed far from such enlightened governance (look at the thickness of our law books and the special pleading and partisanship they reflect), how much less the Cubas, Chinas and Irans of the world.
Without a General Will there can be no Social Contract and therefore no good government since one signatory to the agreement will always be missing. The planet represents a massive series of experiments in governing, not all of which are equally successful. To toss them all in to one single beaker and expect something useful to be created in the process will forever yield bad results. It's faith based on bad understanding and wishful thinking. Garbage in, garbage out.
The last sentence describes the whole UN organization perfectly: "Garbage in, garbage out".
Now that's an election Jimmy Carter would approve of.