NGOs’ questioning of the Human Rights Council

Geneva — Starting next week, the United Nation’s new Geneva-based Human Rights Council will replace the 60-year-old UN Commission on Human Rights. One of the clichés on this year’s session of the new Council is that it would create a real window of opportunity and that governments, NGOs, institutions, and human rights activists must take advantage of it. But this window of opportunity has been subjected to much questioning, foremost by various non-governmental organizations.

Eric Sottas, the director of a Geneva-based NGO, World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) is alarmed that the new Council might pose more difficulties for NGOs’ role, rather than faciliting their presence in it. The major obstacle to the NGOs arises from the Council’s spread of its activity over three sessions per year with the possibility that NGO’s voices remain unheard in its sessions.

Among other factors at play is the transport costs for those NGOs without a permanent representative in Geneva. A few organizations have plans to establish a permanent presence, but the OMCT’s director fears that these organizations and his own could then end up acting as a sort of bureaucracy between the UN, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, grassroots human right activists and institutions working out in the field. Many medium-size NGOs would then remain outside of the Council owning to costs.

A major preoccupation of a few other NGOs is the future role of the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, and its subsidiary bodies under the new Council. Romuald Pial Mezala from the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples (LIDLIP) argues that the Sub-Commission, and its working groups under the old UN’s human rights body were the most accessible organ to NGOs. He points to their independent aspects, of which objectivity and scientific approaches have created most proposals in the former human rights authority. The LIDLIP’s secretary general Verena Graf would see an effective human rights authority only when the core of its body is an independent entity from state governments.

Tunisian lawyer Radhia Nasraoui, and the director of the Association for the Struggle against Torture in Tunisia (ALTT), in an interview with the Swiss news agency InfoSud raised her concerns over the membership of Tunisia in the Council. She points out that, once Tunisia was elected a member, the Council lost its credibility. "It is a pity", she said in the interview, "we could use such an authority for the struggle against the dictators."

Other institutions such as the Arab Commission for Human Rights (ACHR) have a more general concerns. The ACHR opposition to the Council is directed also at other Arab members on the Council with low human rights standards, notably Algeria and Saudi Arabia. In order that their voices be heard, the ACHR is planning a public protest in opposition to those Arab states that are members of the Council during its first session.

Despite the Council’s hardly encouraging prognosis, there remains the possibility of proving the skeptics wrong. The OMCT’s director points out that to get a truly functioning Council up and running will take, at the least, more than a year. The Council’s universal periodic peer review mechanism is among the procedures that must be created by the first members on the Council. This mechanism is necessary to fulfill a requirement that the member countries’ human rights records be subjected to a careful examination. However, Eric Sottas estimates that an effective Council will most probably not see the light of day until late 2007 or even early 2008.