On the occasion of his inauguration as the next Secretary-General, Human Rights Watch identifies some of the key human rights challenges Ban will have to confront.
The UN’s role in human rights has never been more important. Crucially, the United Nations has shown the ability to do more for human rights than the sum of its parts—particularly when it has a committed Secretary-General at the helm. Your leadership on this issue could not be more important.
As the leader of the UN system and as its chief advocate, it is vital that you speak out in defense of human rights—even when the violator of these rights is a powerful government. Your early and public attention to human rights will send a signal to abusive governments that the UN Secretary-General will speak out for the victims of human rights violations worldwide, emphasizing the universal basis of human rights. Such statements will also underline to those resisting change within the UN that human rights mainstreaming will accelerate.
Human Rights and Peace and Security
Secretary-General Annan made a compelling case for the interrelationship of human rights and the UN’s work on peace and security. In this context, there are important and historic battles still to be won.
The Responsibility to Protect
The UN’s greatest challenge and its best known failures involve its response to mass atrocities. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1999, Kofi Annan argued that “the core challenge to the Security Council and to the United Nations as a whole in the next century” would be “to forge unity behind the principle that massive and systematic violations of human rights—wherever they may take place—should not be allowed to stand.”
Six years later at the 2005 World Summit, world leaders agreed to recognize a “responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.”
Recognition of the responsibility to protect (R2P) was in some sense the culmination of Annan’s tenure as Secretary-General. Your challenge is to make the agreed principle a reality. While R2P, as it has come to be known, is mistakenly often seen as synonymous only with forcible humanitarian intervention, in fact R2P encompasses a broad continuum of actions where forcible intervention is at one end of the spectrum.
We hope you will work with the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide to flesh out the continuum and develop indicators for situations in which the responsibility to protect is implicated. We hope, too, that you will support Secretary-General Annan’s request to create a permanent core of UN staff that would be available for deployment on urgent peacekeeping or special political missions.
Your office and the Special Advisor should act as watchdogs for situations in which the responsibility to protect is implicated, and they should be willing to speak loudly and often when the responsibility to protect is not being met.
Darfur
The credibility both of the responsibility to protect and of the entire UN system will depend, at least in part, upon how the United Nations responds to the Darfur crisis, in which the Sudanese government and allied militias have forcibly displaced over two million people; over 200,000 have been killed and tens of thousands of women have been subject to sexual violence. The UN’s apparent impotence in the face of the government of Sudan’s barbarity and stubborn refusal to allow a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur raises justified concerns that the R2P is merely rhetoric.
In such a situation, the Secretary-General must act as the conscience of the United Nations and its members. You can use the platform provided by your office to shine a sustained spotlight on the plight of the people of Darfur. You can use your diplomatic role to conduct a persistent dialogue with UN member states that have put their own interests before those of the principles of R2P. We hope you will encourage African and Arab states to set aside concerns of regional solidarity and put the principle of R2P into practice by being willing to condemn the Sudanese government, and call for stronger sanctions to stop its murderous policies.
Security Council
Despite progress, the Security Council’s practices relating to human rights are still sporadic and inconsistent. Its ability to put human security concerns at the heart of its management of peace and security—and thus its commitment to address the human rights violations found in most peace and security crises—seem to depend less on the level of abuses or their relationship to security, and more on the weight and persistence of those countries who seek to place the issue on the Security Council’s agenda. We hope you will push for integration of human rights in the work of the Security Council in a more systematic manner including in your own reports to the Security Council, and take up your predecessor’s call for a greater role for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Security Council discussions.
The responsibility to protect also has a direct bearing on the Security Council’s work, and on its consideration of human rights crises. As the World Summit outcome document makes clear, collective action should be taken through the Security Council when non-coercive means have proven inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations. To be able to exercise that power appropriately, the Security Council should be prepared to discuss situations implicating the responsibility to protect, regardless of where they fall on the R2P continuum discussed above. You can encourage integration of Responsibility to Protect issues into the Security Council’s agenda in a consistent and timely manner.
Annan’s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change also called on the permanent members of the Security Council to “refrain from the use of the veto in cases of genocide and large scale human rights abuses.” You should also encourage Security Council members to commit themselves to that practice, as it is essential if the council is to live up to its commitment to the responsibility to protect.
Building a New UN for Women
In no area has the UN’s promise on human rights fallen as far short as it has on women’s rights. The first target within the Millennium Development Goals to go unmet was the objective of eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education by 2005. The limitations of gender mainstreaming efforts have been widely recognized. The Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on UN System-Wide Coherence in the areas of Development, Humanitarian Assistance and the Environment acknowledged “a strong sense” that the UN’s contribution to achieving gender equality “has been incoherent, under-resourced and fragmented.”
As with human rights generally, the major challenge faced today in women’s human rights is not in standard-setting but implementation. The United Nations is ill-equipped to meet that challenge, as the coherence panel concluded. The panel’s report laid bare the deficiencies of the existing system, and called for the creation of a unified approach. Creating a new framework for the UN’s women’s human rights work—a “new UN for women”—could become your signature achievement.
Strengthening UN Human Rights Institutions
Human Rights Council
Sadly, the new Human Rights Council has fallen prey to some of the same problems that doomed its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights. It has failed to take concrete action regarding human rights abuses in places like Darfur, Burma, Uzbekistan, or Colombia. During the same period, the Council has adopted resolutions condemning Israeli human rights violations, without even mentioning abuses by Palestinian armed groups or Hezbollah. States with poor human rights records, particularly some members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, are working to render the new institution impotent, including through suggesting that the body not be able to address human rights situations in particular countries at all. States ordinarily supportive of human rights have been slow to react, and have failed to put forward their own agenda for this new body.
This reform cannot be allowed to fail. Secretary-General Annan led the initiative to create the council, and it will be important for you to help defend this fledgling institution and get it on track. You can help rally support for a broad cross-regional coalition of “friends of human rights” within the council that would take action on pressing issues and act as a counterweight to those states that are seeking to weaken the new body.
Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
The United Nations’ ability to move from rhetorical support for human rights to real strengthening of human rights protection on the ground is dependent upon the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
Two crucial elements of the OHCHR plan are a substantial strengthening of the OHCHR’s field presence, and an expansion of its New York office. Both will be critical to the UN’s ability to meet the challenges it faces in the coming decade.
Given the symbiotic relationship between peace and security, development, and human rights, the human rights office of the UN must be able to engage frequently and at the right level with the UN’s institutions and agencies which are based in New York. This requires a larger office, but also a more powerful one. The office should be headed by an Assistant Secretary-General, and the head of office should be able to represent the UNHCHR in meetings of the new Secretary-General’s cabinet (the UN’s Senior Management Group).
Experience shows that it will also be necessary to stand behind the UNHCHR and defend the independence of her office at all costs.
Mainstreaming Human Rights
As Secretary-General, Kofi Annan emphasized mainstreaming of human rights as a centerpiece of his UN reform agenda. In many circumstances, human rights protection is an afterthought or worse, is seen as an unnecessary obstacle in the path of other objectives. In other cases, even where the commitment is strong, UN agencies and departments have yet to find ways of making real the integration of human rights into their policies, programs, and actions. When the United Nations engaged in Afghanistan, those who counseled that human rights concerns should prevent too great a reliance on warlords were overruled. Afghanistan is paying the price today. “Pragmatism” proved to be shortsightedness.
Effective mainstreaming of human rights requires leadership, both from the Secretary-General himself, and from other senior UN staff. You will need to select individuals for your senior staff who are truly committed to human rights, and hold them accountable when they fail to uphold the human rights standards of the United Nations in their interactions with national actors.
We wish you success in your endeavors.
Yours sincerely,
Kenneth Roth
Executive Director
