Staying Healthy

By the end of week 3 of any March Council session everyone tends to look pretty frazzled. The combination of lack of time for proper meals, general neglect in the finer aspects of personal grooming and the knowledge that the session still has some time to go tend to take their toll. But this year there seems to have been more than the usual number of council viruses doing the rounds, depleting the numbers of delegates and testing the resolve of the overstretched colleagues that can still force themselves to work.

The UK team seems to have been particularly badly hit so to stave off sickness, I’ve converted my work rucksack into a portable pharmacy, complete with vitamin supplements, 3 types of flu relief, inhalers, rehydration sachets, emergency chocolate bars and blood pressure equipment. It’s working for me so far, but the extra weight load has aggravated my bad back, so I’m hoping someone will take up a spot of Council moonlighting as an amateur chiropractor in one of the smaller meeting rooms.

During week 3 the Council looked at the world’s most egregious human rights crises and heard reports from its Commissions of Inquiry and country Rapporteurs. The Council is fortunate to have some really high calibre people working on its country mandates, under extremely challenging conditions. So far neither the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, headed by former Brazilian Minister Paulo Pinheiro nor the one on Eritrea headed by Australian Mike Smith have been able to gain access to the countries they monitor. But both Commissions have done an excellent job in documenting violations to make sure the world can be in no doubt about the horrors committed by the ruling regimes and so that one day those responsible can be held to account.

The Council also heard from its experts on Iran, Burma and North Korea. In his latest report on Iran, Ahmed Shaheed drew attention to the extremely high and rising number of executions -over 750 in 2014. Iran continues to execute those who commit offences while juveniles in clear breach of its international law obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Among many other human rights violations, Dr Shaheed drew attention to the ongoing arbitrary arrests, detention, discrimination and incitement to hatred faced by those belonging to the Baha’i faith: arrests last year have brought the total number of Baha’is in detention to 100.

Since taking on the role of Special Rapporteur on Burma, Yanghee Lee has struck an admirable balance in drawing attention to the many serious problems which remain while trying to work cooperatively with the government to improve the situation. Ms Lee has plenty of experience to offer as a former Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, and having lived through the Republic of Korea’s transition from military rule to democracy. Regrettably Ms Lee has recently been subjected to deplorable personal insults and threats by an extremist nationalist monk in Burma for drawing attention to the plight of the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state. While the Burmese government was not directly responsible, it has failed to speak out against these verbal attacks.

By Thursday lunchtime’s tabling deadline 28 resolutions had been formally presented, with a few more still expected to come next week. Cuba has put forward a particularly troublesome text under the heading of Composition of Staff of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. For several years the resolution has been a way of trying to put the Office under pressure to take on a greater portion of non-western staff, though the Office is in fact constrained by UN recruitment rules which apply across the system and which it can do little about. The UN should be as representative as possible but this year’s resolution aims to curtail the independence of the High Commissioner’s Office. The resolution takes up a controversial UN report which recommended that the UN General Assembly begin a process to give states more control over what the Office does. Such a move would have a chilling effect on the High Commissioner’s ability to act as an objective monitor of the actions of all UN member states and to respond to violations wherever they occur. The report has no place in Cuba’s resolution on staffing and should be strongly opposed by Council members.

Week 4 is sure to contain some fireworks as we move towards the finalisation of all resolutions and voting in the last couple of days. I hope you’re all well enough to make it through to the end. But if you’re feeling under the weather I’ve still got plenty of supplies.