Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me to testify on this vitally important issue.

Mr. Chairman, This is the year that the world’s most repressive dictatorships have made real progress in their effort to destroy the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which, when it functions as intended, is one of the truly useful bodies of the United Nations in assisting the victims of repression and tyranny.

As almost everyone now knows, the United States, which had been a founding member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from its founding in 1947, was not re-elected to the Commission and so will not be eligible to participate in its activities for the coming year.

But virtually all the dictatorships in the world will be participating in the Human Rights Commission next year doing the sort of things that dictatorships do – repressing others, jailing them, denying them free speech, press and assembly and trying to bar from taking part in Commission activities those NGOs which are most active in promoting free speech, press and assembly, personal security and rule of law. Charges have been brought against Freedom House, whose annual survey of freedom in the world is greatly resented by China among other tyrannies who with support of Cuba and Sudan brought the charges against Freedom House and the Christian Solidarity International, a U.S. Protestant group.

An accrediting committee of 19 "like-minded" will consider the charges against Freedom House. They will seek to revise the rules on accreditation to the Commission making it impossible for victims of repression to speak to the Human Rights Commission and to circulate "politically motivated material" describing their treatment.

In the Human Rights Commission today, accredited NGOs can invite persons of their choosing, including victims of human rights’ abuse, to speak at the forums, a right granted by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). China would like to put an end to these procedures.

China has insisted their "national sovereignty" be respected. "They must neither abuse their consultative stakes, nor act against the principles and purposes of the U.N. Charter."

China has also tried to have the United Nations and the canton of Geneva ban demonstrations by the Falun Gong outside the U.N. Headquarters. They have made three written charges:

They have complained that Freedom House violated the rules concerning Chinese interpretation.

They asserted that Freedom House included a terrorist group (which is not true).

And Russia criticized Freedom House for interference in Chechenya.

For several years the U.N.’s repressive regimes have sought to hamper the Human Rights Commission by joining it and each year more repressive regimes achieved membership, but the solidarity of democracies has prevented the dictatorship from gaining control. But the margins have grown smaller and the straight speaking more timid. Often it has been the United States which has taken the lead in gathering the material and the votes to make the case against tyranny and repression inside the Human Rights Commission.

That is doubtless the reason that a major effort was made this year to eliminate the U.S. presence from the Human Rights Commission. The effort was successful, as everyone now knows. It was successful because several of the Western democracies, with whom the United States has worked to make the United Nations useful in defense of the values for it was founded, dropped out of the struggle.

As in all U.N. Commissions, states are nominated through their participation in a geographical group. The United States participates in the WEOG group ( Western Europe and other Governments). Moreover, through the history of the United Nations, the United States and any other permanent member has served on any committee it chose to be on, under the "permanent members convention". France, the United Kingdom, Russia, China and the United States have always been assigned in this way until Spring 2001.

What Happened?

I initially hazarded the guess that the absence of a chief U.S. Ambassador for four to six months had left the U.S. government less well informed, less active and more vulnerable to ambush than we otherwise might have been. That may well have been a factor, but reflecting further on the issue, I conclude that what happened could have happened even if we had had a full complement of representatives in the U.S. Mission and the Department of State.

I also looked at a previous occasion when the United States was denied re-election — to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (May, 1994).

Its seats were allocated among regional groups and then subjected to election in ECOSOC. There, too, the U.S. was apparently defeated by its friends, principally because its friends in the European Union filled all three seats.

This year most American analysts start from the fact that three EU nations took all three seats – France, Sweden and Austria – on the Human Rights Commission and the International Narcotics Control Board – France, Austria and the Netherlands – as evidence there was a snub of Washington by the European Union. On the Human Rights Commission, France had 52 votes out of a possible 54, Austria 41, and Sweden with 32. The United States trailed with 29.

I believe the United States lost its seat by the unraveling of a longstanding understanding with Europe that provided that the United States would hold one of the three seats reserved for Western nations and that happened because of the consolidation of the EU.

Other explanations offered for the U.S. defeat in human rights explained it as a consequence of the U.S. habit of mounting a vigorous case against human rights abuses, as when in the session just past American delegates targeted both China and Cuba, both of whom then vigorously lobbied against the United States.

Congressman Henry Hyde, (R. Illinois), the new chair of the International Relations Committee in the House of Representatives, described the U.S. defeat as "a deliberate attempt to punish the U.S. for its insistence that the commission will tell the truth about human rights abuses wherever they occur."

Hyde was probably right. The U.S. habit of telling the truth in the United Nations about human rights violations of some governments against their citizens is almost surely the reason some countries opposed the U.S. re-election to the Committee.

Israel is also an issue. The United States is the only country in the United Nations that regularly defends Israel against unfair attacks. This year only the U.S. and Israel voted nearly alone (with some help from Guatemala) against five resolutions condemning Israel’s "disproportionate" use of force in the "Palestinian territories" and calling for a halt on building new Jewish settlements and denouncing Israel for various crimes. The EU, Russia and few others abstained against this calumny. The result was a vote of 28 states for condemnation, 2 Israel and the U.S. and sometimes Guatemala against , and 22 abstentions.

There is another factor. In recent years, more and more governments, who are themselves infamous human rights violators, have managed to get themselves elected to the human rights commission (thereby acquiring a vote and influencing outcomes): Libya, Syria, Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Vietnam, China and Cuba are also members. They would like to prevent membership of any country which actually wants to talk about human rights abuses.

But the United States lost in the WEOG group.

The Ambassador of France attributed the success of his country in the Human Rights Commission to the French practice of founding its foreign policy on "dialogue and respect." But it is also based it on the French habit of not criticizing any country no matter how heinous their abuse. China agrees with France that the French way is better. China suggests that the United States should "stop using human rights issues as a tool to pursue its power politics and hegemonism." Of course, the United States can do that when China stops using its power to violate its citizens’ human rights.

The U.S. government has no friends among these countries who regularly deny their citizens freedom and due process. But some of our European friends do and they treat them well. It is called "real politik" and it works.

There is not much question that the distance between the United States and its Western European allies has grown in the last decade. The European press shows their displeasure with the United States in a steady stream of articles highly critical of the "American way." The criticism has intensified since the inauguration of the Bush administration which undertook to move America rightward at a time when all but two of the 15 member states of the EU have socialist governments.

The United States will never be able to achieve its goals or even to work for them effectively toward its goals in the U.N. commissions, if, in addition to opposing our adversaries, we must also compete with our friends. Our one vote can never win against the EU’s fifteen.

Opposing the United States at the United Nations is easy because it is risk-free. There have been few consequences for opposing and attacking the United States inside the United Nations. The United States has a habit of acting as though everything matters to us, but nothing matters much.

George Kennan’s famous warning of 1954 is clearly relevant to our predicament, but nobody has heeded it. In 1954, he wrote, and I quote:

"I view with skepticism our chances for exerting any useful influence unless we learn how to create respect for our possible disfavor, at least as great as the respect for our possible favor."

Kennan knew the behavior of nations is not normally motivated by disinterested gratitude or friendship, but rather by the hope of gains and the fear of loss. Kennan knew that it was important for a nation seeking influence to remember what Thomas Jefferson had called "the peaceable coercions" of international politics.

What could we do?

Several members of the Congress have offered suggestions about "peaceable coersions" the U.S. might utilize. The Speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert, offered a suggestion when he said the U.N. action might force lawmakers to reconsider a carefully wrought agreement worked out between the Senate and the Clinton administration to pay outstanding American dues to the United Nations. He noted that the House was expected to take up the issue for the first time next week as part of the State Department authorization bill.

The complex politics of the United Nations requires cultivating and maintaining relations with a hundred different countries in the United Nations, inside the United Nations, and outside the United Nations. But these relations need to be reciprocal. They need to be based on mutual respect and not on our respecting others while others fail to respect us. That reciprocity has to be continuously renewed. It doesn’t require that the United States dominate, or impose its view, or carry the day on every issue in the United Nations, or even most issues in the United Nations. In fact, in order to be effective, we have to recognize the interests of other nations, we may sometimes need to give priority to their concerns where issues are more directly relevant to their vital national security.

Our effectiveness in the United Nations, or, I believe, the world, does not require that we impose our world view on everyone else. It does require that we secure a decent respect for ourselves and our most important principles and interests.

Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick is a senior fellow at AEI.