Rights groups angry at blocking tactics in UN

By Frances Williams

GENEVA, April 17, 2004 (Financial Times) — Human rights groups reacted angrily yesterday as moves in the United Nations’ main human rights watchdog to condemn human rights violations in China and by Russia in Chechnya were blocked.

Developing countries on the UN human rights commission killed the proposal. Zimbabwe also avoided censure, although resolutions were adopted on North Korea, Cuba, Belarus and Turkmenistan.

“The commission’s votes show that powerful countries like Russia and China can still get away with murder, torture and the silencing of critics,” said Joanna Weschler of US-based Human Rights Watch, the campaigning organisation. “Commission censure is increasingly limited to politically isolated countries.”

Human rights activists say the commission has become increasingly politicised in recent years. Commission members are nominated by regional groupings with little regard for their human rights records.

Current members include five countries named in resolutions for gross human rights violations – Zimbabwe, Sudan, China, Russia and Cuba – as well as others with grim human rights histories.

Last year western countries unsuccessfully chal lenged African countries’ choice of Libya to take the region’s turn to chair the human rights commission.

Developing nations argue that resolutions against particular countries are a political tool used against them by western nations, which brook no criticism of their own human rights abuses.

Before the annual session of the commission began in March, the African group said it might call for the agenda item allowing condemnation of particular countries to be scrapped altogether – a demand it did not eventually press.

In retaliation for the US-backed resolution on Cuba, which passed by a single vote on Thursday, Havana has put forward a resolution condemning US detention of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. But this resolution is unlikely to succeed when it is voted on next week..

China escaped censure after using a procedural “no action” motion to block discussion of a US-sponsored resolution that called on Beijing to take steps to ensure respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. This was the 11th time in 12 years that China has prevented discussion of a critical resolution. None was put forward last year.

Beijing, which suspended its human rights dialogue with the US last month in protest at the planned resolution, said yesterday that Washington should “abandon confrontation” over human rights. Zimbabwe also used a “no action” motion to block criticism.