UN - VERY interesting insight--was it Mary Robinson who engineered loss of seats?

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Wall St Journal

What's That You Say, Mrs. Robinson?
The politics of the latest U.N. outrage.

BY SETH LIPSKY
Wednesday, May 9, 2001 12:01 a.m. News that America has been voted off the United Nations Human Rights Commission makes me think of Morris Abram. Until he died last year, Abram headed an organization called United Nations Watch, which is based in Geneva, where he had been the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. After leaving government service, he stayed in Geneva to set up United Nations Watch as a sentry against members violating the spirit of the U.N. charter.

"People behave better when they know they're being watched," is how Abram explained his mission.

A courtly former army officer, Abram rose from the deep South to be one of the greatest civil-rights lawyers in American history. A war-crimes prosecutor at Nuremberg, he was also an architect of the legal campaign that secured the one-man-one-vote decision in the U.S. Supreme Court. He was later president of the American Jewish Committee and chairman of the National Council for Soviet Jewry. President Reagan appointed him to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

All his legendary capacity for moral outrage, all his experience in combating injustice, came together when he entered the struggle to save the U.N. from itself. He understood that a great deal of what animated the U.N. and its agencies was plain old-fashioned anti-Semitism, posing as hostility to Israel. And the struggle against Israel was in league with the Soviet Union or its stooges. Yet he believed--a lot more than I do, incidentally--in what might be called constructive engagement with the United Nations.

In his final years, Abram was nigh obsessed with the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. He understood that there was only one explanation for the fact that with all the injustices in the world the commission paid so little attention to Cuba, say, or China or Sudan, and so much to Israel. He was particularly disappointed in the U.N.'s high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, formerly president of Ireland. Abram suspected that she had turned against Israel to curry favor with the Arabs in a bid, ultimately, to succeed Kofi Annan as U.N. secretary-general.

The result of this game we glimpsed recently at the regional conference of U.N. members held in Iran's capital. A declaration issued at the end of the conference denounced Israel in language reminiscent of the days when the U.N. held Israel's national movement, Zionism, to be a form of racism. The first President Bush led a long campaign to get the General Assembly to rescind its Zionism-is-racism resolution, which it finally did in 1991.

After the regional conference in Tehran, the Jewish Forward newspaper quoted Israel's No. 2 diplomat at the U.N., Aharon Ya'acov, as asserting that Arab diplomats, led by the Palestinians, were using the old alliances of the Cold War to revive the spirit of the resolution through the back door. No doubt all this will come to a head at the U.N.'s world conference against racism scheduled this summer in Durban, South Africa. Sources quoted by the Forward reckon Mrs. Robinson wants to use the conference as her springboard to the post now occupied by Mr. Annan, though Mr. Annan may get another term and Durban may prove to be Mrs. Robinson's last hurrah.

American diplomats aren't confronting Mrs. Robinson. And leaders on Capitol Hill, who have been comparatively savvy about the U.N., reckon the problem in the latest imbroglio is not so much Mrs. Robinson or the Human Rights Commission itself as the governments of European countries. They describe what amounts to a kind of musical chairs over membership on the commission. With three seats available for representatives of four countries--Austria, France, Sweden and the U.S.--they decided to eject America.

Sen. Jesse Helms's spokesman is suggesting that it might be time for the Foreign Relations Committee to deal with European recalcitrance by upping the ante. The idea would be that if the Europeans are so hell-bent on solidarity, with respect to the U.S., as in the Human Rights Commission vote, then they should get one permanent seat for the European Union on the security council, rather than one seat each for Britain and France. The other seat would go to Japan, which pays a huge amount of the bills of the U.N.

I can't help thinking how much I miss being able to telephone Ambassador Abram for advice on all this. No doubt he'd have been all over this situation. One of Abrams's acolytes, Michael Colson, executive director of United Nations Watch, says that if Abrams were alive today, he would thrill at the prospect of standing alone in the capitals of Europe and elsewhere and proclaiming American ideals. "What's happening here," Mr. Colson says, "is as much a frontal assault on the United States and American values as anything anywhere in the world."

Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.

-- Anonymous, May 09, 2001

Answers

BBC Wednesday, 9 May, 2001, 19:43 GMT 20:43 UK Row flares between US and UN

The human rights vote made headlines round the world

By Mike Donkin in New York

The United Nations has appealed to the US Congress not to seek to withhold nearly $250m owed to the UN because America has been voted off a key committee.

Leading Republicans are demanding that the money - owed in back dues - be withheld unless the United States is reinstated to the UN Human Rights Commission when seats are next contested.

The row has been fuelled by the eviction of the US representative on another UN body, the international narcotics board.

The rejection of American candidates from the two bodies came as a shock. Even before the threats from the US Congress it had been the hot topic in UN corridors.

The popular explanations were, first, anger at the US over what is seen as an increasing bias against the Palestinians in the Mid-East crisis, and a selfish head-in-the sand stance on climate change and the environment.

Then, that those with a traditional grudge against the US had used the secret ballots by the UN Social and Economic Council as the chance to get back

In Washington, the House International Affairs Committee has agreed to pay its current instalment in back dues to the UN.

But there were calls for the next bill - for $244m - to be kept back. House Majority leader Dick Armey said it was "an affront to the whole notion of human rights" to have no American voice on the commission dealing with those issues.

UN 'dismayed'

Most European missions here agree. It was "the more ridiculous", one diplomat said, "given that countries which were consistent perpetrators of abuse, like Sudan, did have seats".

There is some embarrassment among European Union members that by voting their own candidates onto the commission they helped vote the US off, and come the next vote in 2002 they plan to get together to redress this.

The vote denying ex-Senator Herbert Okun a seat on the International Narcotics Control Board compounded US resentment.

This body monitors the manufacture and sale of opium derivatives like morphine, stimulants and other drugs which can be illegally exploited.

It also seeks to prevent trafficking. It is another area in which the US always has crucial concerns.

The official UN line is that it, too, is dismayed at America's rejection, especially from the Human Rights Commission.

It's also worried at the sabre-rattling over UN dues in Congress.

The spokesman for the secretary-general appealed to them not to "shoot the messenger".

Holding money back as punishment, he said "would be counterproductive, and unfair" to all 189 UN member nations.

Speedy return?

Unofficially there is some exasperation that the US seems to expect a place on key bodies as a right because it is so powerful.

"Every nation here fails to win elections sometimes," one senior UN source said.

And when it comes to the $0.25bn, he pointed out, those are back dues only now being paid on Washington's condition that its overall contributions to the UN were cut.

In the press corridors here one veteran of many such standoffs viewed this latest round wearily.

"There are as many reasons to vote against the Americans on these issues as there are nations at the UN," he said.

"But there'll be a fix and they'll be back on the Human Rights Commission next year."

Another seasoned observer added: "Meantime if the Americans get to do a little less preaching on human rights - from the outside - and a bit more listening, it won't do them any harm."

-- Anonymous, May 09, 2001


No...it won't do us any harm. Would do some good if we just told the UN that we have decided to rent the building elsewhere! We need to get out of the UN. Let the EU run it and take care of the world's problems, especially the Balkans! Taz

-- Anonymous, May 10, 2001

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