The Economist
November 12, 2013
The UN Human Rights Council was voted into existence in 2006, in the hope that it would do a better job than its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, at promoting the basic freedoms which almost every country in the world has accepted, in theory. It was hoped, for example, that there would be healthy competition for places on the new body’s rotating membership of 47 nations. Countries aspiring to a place on the council would, so the theory went, have an an incentive to behave better.
It doesn’t seem to have worked. Let’s focus purely on religious freedom, which is the main concern of Erasmus, and is by most people’s lights an important human entitlement. Of the 14 nations voted onto the council today, three—China, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam—have been designated by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom as “countries of particular concern” in respect of religious liberty, while another two—Russia and Cuba—are deemed by the Commission to violate liberty of conscience in significant ways.
Now one can, of course, challenge the Commission’s hierarchy of violators; between and within healthy democracies there can be hard arguments over what exactly amounts to an infringement of religious rights. But Saudi Arabia does not even pretend to respect religious freedom, or to tolerate any form of overt religious practice other than the officially approved interpretation of Sunni Islam. The practical consequences of this stance can be appalling. In August, the Saudi founder of a mildly liberal website was sentenced to seven years in jail and 600 lashes for “insulting Islam” by encouraging some cautious religious debate. If the charge of apostasy—leaving Islam—had been upheld, he would have faced the death penalty.
In China, as the US Commission notes in its latest report, “religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain particularly acute, as the government broadened its efforts to discredit and imprison religious leaders, control the selection of clergy, ban certain religious gatherings, and control the distribution of religious literature….” The government of Vietnam “continued to expand control of all religious activities, severely restrict independent religious practice and repress individuals and religious groups…”
There are lots of global issues, from climate change to drug-trafficking, which need to be discussed in all-inclusive global institutions in the hope of finding practical solutions. And if the Human Rights Council were purely a talking shop, in which countries held vigorous discussions about which human rights were fundamental and how they should be observed, then that too might serve some useful purpose; holding one’s corner in a public argument does not have to compromise anyone’s integrity. But the Human Rights Council aims to do more than that; it aspires, in the name of its members, to smoke out, shame and hold to account violators of basic rights.
Given that more governments (including some Western ones) violate human rights than respect them, I’m not sure that global, inter-governmental bodies in this field can serve any purpose. It may still be useful for groups of governments (like the Council of Europe) to band together to agree to observe certain standards. But for an organisation to work credibly for human rights at a global level, with no geopolitical or cultural bias, it needs to be as independent as possible from all govermments, and hence from all violators.
