The birth of the UN Human Rights Council

The birth of the UN Human Rights Council : the new body shares the mixed nature of the whole UN enterprise: a heady admixture of high principles and standards together with the abrasive realities of international politics. It is welcome that the new institutional structure (unlike the outgoing Commission on Human Rights) filters out most of the states with low regard for human rights, but disappointing that abusive states like China, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have succeeded in obtaining Council seats. Perhaps the best feature of the new Council is the requirement for council members to undergo a periodic review of their human rights performance. The quality of this review, and the way in which it is presented, is critical to the success of the new Human Rights Council.

States whose reviews will be embarrassing will try to have the result of the reviews kept secret, or presented in such an obscure format that they are not accessible to anyone but a librarian or research student. People who care about human rights will wish to see the reviews made public in an accessible form. Wordy, qualitative reviews should be reduced to numbers, and the numbers ranked in order, so that an interested observer can tell at a glance at which end of the scale any Council member is positioned.

The long term importance of this approach is that what applies to Council members now may eventually be applied to all UN members. Assuming that we truly wish to see the principles contained in the Declaration of Human Rights applied in political reality across the board, we must measure human rights performance by all nation states, and publish the results in an easily accessible form. It is axiomatic that to manage something, it must be measured.

This is a debate that is just beginning to stir among human rights NGOs. The major worry has related to the difficulty of getting an accurate measurement of such a multi-faceted quality as human rights performance. Perfection is of course never achievable, but there is an elegant intrinsic corrective mechanism within the idea of an index of human rights, since it is open to any state objecting to their assessment to make their prisons available to inspection for a putative UN human rights ranking appeals tribunal. Prior to the arrival of the tribunal, we could confidently expect to see a number of political prisoners released.

The other objection that is often brought to bear, paradoxically, by human rights advocates, is that of political practicality; it is objected that states such as the USA and China will never allow it to come about they say, since they would not wish to lay themselves open to criticism. This objection lies at the heart of the UN paradox: somehow, a group of states motivated purely by self interest have managed to create a community at whose core lies a statement of high ideals. Instead of worrying about the reaction of abusers, who will surely be ready to speak up for themselves when the time comes, those who would wish to see progress in human rights should be murmuring into the ears of the best practitioners the suggestion that an instrument exists which, once put in place in the UN, would exert a gentle, continuous, upward pressure on human rights practices world wide.

Occupation : Jobbing Squaddie (Platoon Pantoum)

It's what we're trained to do, it's just our job.
If jumped up Hitlers want to get tooled out
with nukes and gas and germs that they can lob
at us, we'll bring them down, no fuckin doubt.

It wasn't so much warfare as a rout.
The worst our unit faced was sand and heat.
Talk about open doors - if we got out
to piss, they'd stick their hands up. They were beat.

It wasn't really such a major feat,
it's just our job, it's what we're trained to do.
First they were friendly, nice as you could meet.
We all relaxed. Nobody had a clue

how it would all go sour. Nobody knew
exactly when we overstayed our leave,
but when a roadside bomb took out our crew
I got the first faint sus we'd been deceived.

We didn't mind the looters and the thieves
we're trained for that, it's all part of the job.
The thing that always makes my stomach heave
is facing down a screaming angry mob.

Stones hurt, bottles can burn, but when they gob
and spit at you, that is the thing...
we sweated blood to save the fuckwit yob
who's screaming hate at you...it's that what stings.

We chased and caught them. Some one brings
them back inside the compound walls.
I heard our sarge say "Make them sing".
We laid in with our toecaps on their balls.

We got court martialled. Told us all to crawl.
Told us what not to say, gave us a gag.
They called it torture. I say we lost our rag.
We'll pay with years for one five minute brawl.

What stupid bastard sent us to this war?
How is this supposed to help the British nation?
They lied to us - we're here for Bush's oil.
No paddle in a shit-creek situation.

Two years have passed since liberation.
There were no WMD. That lying slob
Blair, he fouled up. This is an occupation.
He should jailed, not us. It's not our job.


(c) Richard Lawson 28.5.05