Resident Scholar Joshua Muravchik

The UN has disappointed in many ways since its founding, but few disappointments have been sharper than in the area of human rights. Arguably, the failure of the Security Council to assemble the kind of international military force to defend the peace that is envisioned in the charter's chapter seven is a more consequential disappointment. However, the reasons for this failure are easier to understand. Perhaps the founders should have known that states would be reluctant to send their citizens to fight and die on behalf of the international community. But why should they have anticipated that governments would be averse simply to acknowledging certain facts about the abuse of human beings?

The Commission on Human Rights, created under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt and on the design of a committee of outstanding international jurists, chalked up such an abysmal record as to make itself, in the words of former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, a stain upon the UN system. Accordingly, Annan proposed that the commission be abolished in favor of a new body, the Human Rights Council, which was given birth at the UN summit meeting of 2005.

The Council was the creature of a powerful coalition. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 had severely strained relations between Washington and the UN Secretariat. But the issue of human rights brought these two forces together. Although the secretary-general's power is only derivative, he still wields much influence in UN deliberations; so does the US, however unpopular its policies of the moment. Both of these partners hoped to create a body that would do honor to the cause of human rights and to the UN. And, although there were many compromises in the design of the council, both thought they had succeeded.

Worse than Ever?

Shockingly, the council has so far amassed a worse record than the discredited commission that it replaced. It is true that the composition of the council has improved. If you examine the human rights performance of its individual members, the average is somewhat better than had been the case with the membership of the commission. (The numerical annual freedom scores issued by Freedom House, called Freedom in the World, make it possible to measure such things with a degree of rigor.

Nonetheless, the new council has gone farther than its predecessor in giving the world's most repressive and abusive governments a free pass. Until the recent crisis in Myanmar, the only state in the world to come in for scolding from the council has been Israel. Not even Sudan, despite the ongoing horrors in Darfur, has had its wrist slapped. And the hounding of Israel has been so relentless that even this has had more the spirit of an act of persecution than defense of the persecuted.

What makes this all the harder to explain is that the large majority of UN members are now democracies. This is a very recent change, and the UN's poor record on human rights was easier to understand when most member states were authoritarian. The painful lesson in this is that most governments--even democratic governments--are unwilling to so much as speak up for human rights if the price is to invite diplomatic friction with abusive regimes. There is no sense in blaming the UN for this, but it is sad that the UN has not generated a culture that would help to change it.

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at AEI. He is the author of The Future of the United Nations: Understanding the Past to Charter a Way Forward (AEI Press, 2005).