US moral authority rests on 'big stick'

When the 192-member UN General Assembly meets in mid-May to elect 14 new members to the 47-nation Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), the United States will be conspicuous by its absence and missing from the ballot. Justifying its decision, Washington says it will skip the elections because the HRC has lost its "credibility" for focusing primarily on one country–Israel–and ignoring "human rights abusers" such as Myanmar (Burma), Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea. But UN diplomats, human rights activists and legal experts point out that the Bush administration has no legitimate right to sit in judgment over the transgressions of others while its own "abusive behavior" is not under scrutiny by any international body. "The United States does not have a shred of moral authority left; its only authority is the big stick," Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said in an interview. He argued that the US claim that it is staying away from the elections because the Council has lost its credibility is "bogus." "It is the United States that has lost its credibility, and that is why it would never be elected. Ask almost anyone in the world whether the US engages in torture–sadly the answer will be affirmative," he added. When the United States ran for a seat back in May 2001, it was ousted from the former 53-member UN Human Rights Commission for the first time since its creation in 1947. The Commission was replaced by a Council last year. But Washington also bypassed the first election, possibly fearing defeat. This is the second consecutive year it has avoided elections to the UN's supreme human rights body. An Asian diplomat said in an interview that the resentment against Washington was so intense at that time that many of the member states, including US allies, who publicly pledged their votes reneged on their promises privately–and got away with it in a secret ballot voting. The US refusal to stand for elections has triggered sharp criticism from at least one US Congressman–Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California–who described the decision as "an act of unparalleled defeatism." Lantos went one step further by accusing the Bush administration of surrendering the HRC to "a cabal of military juntas, single-party states and tin-pot dictators" who will retain "their death grip on the world's human rights machinery." The US State Department said last month that the HRC is not a "credible body" because it refused to pass strictures on some of the world's major "human rights abusers," including Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Iran and North Korea. Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, says the United States is certainly not the only country which has engaged in violations of international humanitarian law to an extent that raises questions regarding the appropriateness of sitting on the UN's Human Rights Council. Indeed, there are quite a few countries that are even worse, he noted, particularly regarding the treatment of their own citizens. "Still, there is perhaps no other country that is so self-righteous about lecturing governments it doesn't like about their human rights abuses while simultaneously defending its own human rights abuses of foreign nationals as well as providing large-scale security assistance to allied regimes which engage in even more egregious human rights abuses," Zunes said in an interview. Even if Lantos' criticism may have hit some of the right targets, says a senior UN official, he is certainly not unaware of the firestorm of criticism triggered by human rights abuses in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at the US detention facility in Guantánamo Bay–along with the US violation of Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war. Ratner said the Bush administration has never been willing to subject its practices to scrutiny by any international body–not the United Nations; not the Human Rights Council; not the International Court of Justice at the Hague; and not the International Criminal Court. "It is unwilling to do so because it fears that the truth will be exposed: the US is in violation of fundamental human rights principles and the world knows it: it tortures, it disappears people, it disregards Geneva, it holds people indefinitely without charges," Ratner said in an interview. Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, said that Washington's decision has far less to do with the claimed reason–that the Council has "failed"–but rather is rooted in fear that the US would once again (as it did in pre-9/11 2001) lose the election and thus fail to win a seat on the Council. She pointed out that human rights has always been the "other side" of the UN's recognition of national sovereignty as the primary basis for the global organization. "Claims of conflict between the supposed absolutism of sovereignty of the Charter and the commitment to individual rights inherent in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have long been the basis for US [and other countries'] posturing as great defenders of human rights in other countries, while expressing outrage that any international organization or any other country might criticize the rampant abuses inside its own borders," Bennis said in an interview. That conflict has increased as US human rights violations–which used to focus on the death penalty, racism and discrimination, denial of economic rights, etc.–have now focused laser-sharp on the individual and globally-televised horrors of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, the "extraordinary rendition" torture program and other torture in the context of the so-called "war on terror." As a result, "the holier-than-thou stand above all you lesser countries" attitude of US diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington has become almost a caricature of itself, said Bennis. In an unusually long recent editorial titled "The Must-Do List," The New York Times lashed out at the Bush administration for its continued abuse of power and violations of civil liberties, described as the founding principles of US democracy. The exhaustive charges against Washington included brutality towards prisoners; the denial of their human rights; the institutionalization of such denials; unlawful spying on US citizens; and the denial of legal challenges in courts. The editorial also called on the Bush administration to restore habeas corpus, ban torture, close prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, account for "ghost prisoners" held in secret camps, ban secret evidence and respect the right to counsel.