GENEVA (Reuters) - Human rights activists said on said on Friday a key U.N. body
had been hijacked by countries bent on stopping it naming those that abuse human
rights.
``An 'abusers club' of governments hostile to human rights has further consolidated
its position and blocked several important country initiatives,'' said Human Rights
Watch.
The six-week annual meeting in Geneva of the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights has traditionally sought to bring pressure on countries that are grave
violators, but activists said there had been an increasing trend to stop pointing
the finger at individual states.
At this year's session which was ending on Friday, the 53-country commission voted
to halt a probe into human rights abuses in Sudan despite the fact that an investigator
had reported no improvement there over the past 12 months.
Debate on Zimbabwe, which Western countries and activists accuse of widespread
abuse, was blocked by African states and a resolution critical of Russian policy
in the separatist region of Chechnya was defeated for the second successive year.
The commission narrowly voted to maintain pressure on member Cuba by insisting
it agree to a visit from a special U.N. rights envoy and to add three states --
North Korea, Turkmenistan and Belarus -- to the shrinking list of those whose
records will be the subject of individual scrutiny.
But in none of these cases was an individual country investigator appointed who
could have intensified the international pressure on the three states, activists
say.
``A growing bloc of repressive governments -- including Algeria, China, Cuba,
Libya, Russia, Sudan, Syria and Zimbabwe -- have become progressively more aggressive
in blocking or obstructing resolutions critical of any specific country,'' the
New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
These countries are all members of the commission.
``States are undermining a large part of what the U.N. system was established
to do, namely to serve as a vanguard of human rights protection,'' declared Ian
Seiderman of the Swiss-based International Commission of Jurists.
NORTH VS SOUTH
Many developing countries are ideologically opposed to putting individual states
in the human rights dock. They also feel that the commission ought give more emphasis
to social and economic rights -- such as the right to health and food -- saying
that political rights mean nothing to those who are starving.
``The commission is divided between North and South, unfortunately,'' said commission
chairwoman Najat al-Hajjaji of Libya, whose election came in the first ever such
vote on the chairmanship in the 57 years of the body.
India, the world's most populous democracy, is among developing countries opposed
to singling out offenders. Its delegation has consistently voted against such
resolutions.
``We believe in advancing the cause of human rights but not through 'naming and
shaming' because it almost never works,'' Debabrata Saha, deputy head of India's
delegation, told Reuters.
But rights activists also accuse Western states, notably the United States and
the European Union, of increasingly putting political considerations ahead of
the fight for human rights.
They say that Washington did not lobby against China, despite continuing allegations
of political and religious persecution there, or against Russia over Chechnya
out of a desire not to worsen relations already fraught over Iraq.