Old Habits

Welcome back. I hope you’ve been having a good 2016. By this stage of the year most people’s well intentioned New Year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside as the demands of winter force us towards the comforting embrace of familiar habits. I spend too much of my working life working on resolutions at the UN to want to spend my winter holidays thinking up any of my own so I let my wife make them for me. This rarely ends well and this year I’ve once again failed to take more exercise, to stay awake on the couch past 9 o’clock or to stop eating all the chocolates just because they’re there. I have put the bins out though.

The Council could do with shedding some bad habits of its own. Despite all the sensible talk of trying to cut down on our ever burgeoning workload, we have just begun the busiest session ever. There will be at least 5 days when the Council will run for 12 hours without a break from 9 in the morning until 9 at night,  a whopping 11 half-day panel discussions and over 40 resolutions to negotiate while all this is going on. When the new Council President, Ambassador Choi, sensibly suggested putting together a small cross-regional group to come up with improvements, he was rather brutishly blocked by a group of Council spoilers led by Russia. So late nights it is. The Latvian Ambassador admirably proposed making the evening sessions obligatory for all Ambassadors, to spur his counterparts into finding a fix. I suspect he’s not made himself too popular with his colleagues though I plan to join him counting up the Ambassadors who put in the late plenary shifts.

We were treated to some senior attendance at Monday’s opening of the session. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon came in person for the first time and praised the Council for taking up issues that others found too difficult to tackle. He commended the Council’s Commission of Inquiry on North Korea  and rightly described the Council’s resolutions on sexual orientation and gender identity as “historic”.

High Commissioner Zeid called for much stronger action to protect civilians in conflict in Syria and many other parts of the world. His message was typically forceful and a fitting reminder of the high responsibility the Council has. This session the Council will need to renew the Commission of Inquiry on violations in Syria. When it was set up in 2011 it seemed unimaginable that we would still need it in 2016. While hopes are high that the current ceasefire process will lead to a lasting peace, the Commission has a crucial role to play in documenting the ongoing and massive scale human rights violations and abuses in the country. The Commission’s latest report  made clear that the Assad regime and Daesh continue to commit crimes against humanity and that accountability must be part of any peace process.

The  Council will also need to respond to reports of horrific violations in South Sudan – a situation which is barely visible in the global media and which demonstrates the importance of monitoring by the Council. Both the UN Mission in the country and the African Union have released alarming reports on South Sudan since the Council last met. Among the shocking acts which have been described are the burning alive of civilians and the use of rape as a weapon of warfare. Along with the United States, Paraguay and Albania, the UK is proposing a new Council mechanism to monitor human rights in the country with the aim of stopping violations by bringing them into the international spotlight.  With abuses on this scale, creating a new mechanism ought to be beyond question. But many will need convincing, especially those who claim to object ‘in principle’ to scrutinising the records of others for fear that they may be next under the spotlight.

The Council will also need to renew its Rapporteurs on Iran, Burma and North Korea who do an excellent job of keeping the world informed of the realities in countries with serious and long-standing human rights concerns. In Burma’s case there is plenty to welcome following last year’s election. But there is a long way to go and Burma stands to benefit from staying on the Council’s agenda while the new government tackles the many challenges it faces.

Whatever you’re working on, I wish you a successful session. If you see me nodding off in the evening sessions please give me a discreet nudge (and a chocolate). Old habits die hard.