Empty Sausages and Children’s Menus

I’m not sure how it started, but there’s a growing trend in UN human rights meetings these days to convey displeasure through culinary metaphor.  The German Ambassador did this to great effect when he revealed his reaction to the latest set of proposals on the Human Rights Council Review, which is finally approaching a close in Geneva.  He shared a German saying that “a sausage is only as good as the ingredients which go into it”. While I share his concern that the result of the long review process is in grave danger of being nothing better than an empty sausage, I am still holding out hope that there will at least be a little bit of gristle in it.

A massive amount of work has gone into the review process, especially by the Council President himself and his 5 noble Ambassadorial facilitators from Brazil, India, Romania Finland and Morocco, who have done much of the leg-work with dignity and good humour. So it will be hugely disappointing all round if there’s little to show when the process wraps up in the coming weeks. Major change was never going to happen – world politics have not moved on enough over the 5 years since the Council’s establishment to rectify some of the more glaring and damaging anomalies in the Council’s make up such as the separate agenda item devoted entirely to the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, while no other country situation is singled out for such selective scrutiny.  But many delegations and NGOs have been holding out hope that the Council President would at least be able to broker a compromise to improve the Council’s ability to respond quickly to developing human rights crises, which has been its major failing in its first 5 years.

 One of the main gaps in the current system is that when a human rights situation in any given country threatens to develop into a full blown crisis, there is no middle ground for the Council between total inactivity and the convening of Special Sessions. These have proved very difficult to hold due to the heavy political baggage this entails and the unwillingness by many states to subject individual countries to scrutiny. And most of the Special Sessions which have occurred, have taken place too late to have any impact on the ground.  To her great credit, the Brazilian Ambassador proposed a workable solution whereby states or the High commissioner for Human Rights could prompt a briefing at an early stage which would allow for an informed and constructive discussion about how the Council could best respond. Regrettably this idea did not feature in the President’s first negotiating text which will form the basis of the final outcome to the review. I hope he can be persuaded to reconsider this.

Elsewhere in the human rights jungle, the legal minds from all delegations have been demonstrating their ability to rise above the political fray by actually managing to agree something important- a new Third Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Protocol will establish a complaints mechanism through which children or their representatives will be able to bring allegations about violations of their rights under the Convention to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. During the drafting, the food analogies were again out in force. The Committee’s Swiss vice Chair Jean Zermatten warned us all that we must not turn the protocol into a children’s menu which gave children less rights than adults. It would not be right, he cautioned, if children were left to chose only ham and chips while the adults got the full range of delights on offer, though if my trips to Swiss restaurants are anything to go by I assume he meant 6 types of melted cheese. I thought seriously about making a point of order to protect the rights of the world’s Jewish, Muslim and vegetarian children to avoid ham and chips but then thought better of it.

Agreement on the text went right down to the wire and it still needs to be agreed by both the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly hopefully this will happen without the text being reopened. Child rights NGOs and experts who have assisted the process, such as Peter Newell from the UK, deserve real credit for getting us this far, as does Slovakia, for being brave enough to take on this idea when no one else wanted to go near it.

Finally, while we’re on the subject of children I’d like to wish warm congratulations to my colleague Becky and her family on the arrival of little Ben. It looks like he’s going to have more rights than we did as children. And a mechanism he can complain to if he doesn’t like what is on the menu.