The Human Rights Council: A Failure in Global Governance

“The UN and Human Rights: A Screaming Start,” makes several valid points of concern in regards to the recently formed Human Rights Council. As the article stipulates, in many ways the Council does not look radically different from its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission, in that it fails to provide membership regulations that would keep “not free” states of the Council (with only twenty-three out of forty-seven states defined as free) and it lacks the clout in the political hierarchy to truly accomplish anything of substance. However, the article does point out that the one mechanism that could prove useful is the new universal periodic review process in which every UN member state must submit to a peer-review of their human rights record every four years. Such a process is a tremendous step forward and it may even provide a mechanism of increased public shame and humiliation of serial offenders of human rights law.

However, what this article fails to address in its critique of the Council is the origin of the organization’s flaws, which is not its membership or its anti-Israeli focus, but its state-centric approach to curtailing human rights violations.