We Need More Naming And Praising In The Human Rights Council

Every year the Human Rights Council organises a retreat. Making the Council more effective is a favourite topic, and was so again last week in Evian.

Many argue that the Human Rights Council is a victim of its own success. Never have its sessions had more resolutions, panels and side events. The Director General of the UN in Geneva has just had to warn that there is no more capacity to accommodate the Council’s ever expanding programme.

Others worry that the constantly accelerating pace of activity has something of Alice in Wonderland’s Red Queen’s race about it, the Council going faster and faster while making less and less progress.

The reality lies somewhere in the middle. Over the last decade, the Council has established itself as the world’s pre-eminent human rights body. But some of the increased activity is a sign of malaise rather than a reflection of this growing role. Divisions in the Council have led to rival resolutions in the same session. Agreements to run resolutions every two or three years rather than annually are undermined by opportunistic initiatives to fill the space. Contested resolutions are now not only voted on – instead of passing by consensus – but aggressively amended, taking up considerable time. Mandates focusing on civil and political rights have to be “balanced” with mandates focusing on social and economic rights.

The upshot is that the resources of the UN’s human rights pillar – only 3% of the total in any case – are spread ever more thinly. The capacity of the members of the Human Rights Council to debate issues and engage with Special Rapporteurs is ever more diluted. My own delegation, that of the United Kingdom, has trouble keeping up with all the activity. And we’re one of the larger ones.

Many sensible ideas have been put forward for making the Council more efficient and effective. But these tend to address the symptoms rather than the root cause: the polarisation in the Council.

Many countries deeply resent what they see as “naming and shaming” in the Council, and say that resolutions selectively single out countries for criticism. The grievance is compounded when it looks like former colonial powers are standing in judgement over developing countries, rather than providing assistance.

The truth is that many developing countries do indeed lack the resources, the social development, and the institutions to implement human rights to the same level as the most advanced countries. For our part, we in the developed world sometimes forget that the progressive agenda we consider self-evident was not obvious even to our parents’ generation. For countries struggling with malnutrition, endemic disease, and mass illiteracy, such an agenda understandably does not have the same priority.

Yet it is also true that some governments cynically use this development argument to justify discrimination and the repression of their own people. And that is why the Council has been right to continue to use its strongest sanctions – item four resolutions, special sessions, special procedures, commissions of inquiry – to focus the world’s attention on major abuses of human rights.

Sometimes, in Sri Lanka and now we hope in Burma, condemnation can give way to cooperation. These are the success stories, where the moral authority of the United Nations has helped to convince regimes and governments to change their ways.

But if we are to overcome the polarisation that is undermining the Council’s effectiveness, we need to do more to accept that progress on human rights is a journey, that we must not make the best the enemy of the good. One way of doing that may be to do more to highlight countries that have made progress, that have benefited from technical assistance, that have developed best practice that may be more relevant than models transplanted from, say, Europe.

The UPR already provides a mechanism for reviewing a country’s human rights situation. There are plenty of excellent examples of imaginative solutions, of successful implementation. What we have lacked is a system collecting this best practice and giving countries credit for doing the right thing.

In short, we need to find more ways of naming and praising countries in the Human Rights Council. If we can advance that idea before our next retreat, we’ll have made real progress.