UN Human Rights Council Cannot Be Relied On

If the US and Israel can unilaterally decide who lives or who dies in this world, and suffer no sanctions, then we are truly living in terrifying times.

October 16, 2024

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that Kenya was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to have a seat at the 47-member UN Human Rights Council, given the history of the Council and the UN in general. The UN Human Rights Council has never been about upholding human rights even though it claims that membership in the Council “comes with the responsibility to uphold human rights”. Its website states that membership in the Council hinges on “the candidate state’s contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights, as well as their voluntary pledges and commitments in this regard”.

Yet, the Council fails to explain why countries such as conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia have held seats in the Council in the past. The wars and conflicts and massive corruption in both the DRC and Somalia have deprived citizens of their basic rights, including health and education. These wars and conflicts have also spawned extremist groups like Al Shabaab.

Kenya applied for a seat at the UN Human Rights Council in September 2024, at a time when there were reports of unlawful killings, abductions and forced disappearances of young men and women who had participated in protests calling for good governance and accountability. Reports indicate that at least 61 people have been murdered by the state’s security apparatus since the youth-led protests against William Ruto’s government in June this year. Many more are believed to have been abducted or forcibly disappeared. Ruto has neither acknowledged these killings and abductions, nor condoled with the families who lost their loved ones.

But despite appeals by organisations such as the Kenya Human Rights Commission, among others, to not accept Kenya’s bid to have a seat at the Council given Kenya’s poor human rights record, the UN General Assembly went ahead and voted for Kenya anyway. The message the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly are giving to rogue governments around the world is this: It doesn’t matter if you violate human rights, you will still get a seat at our table. (We must also remember that many of the 193 members of the UN General Assembly are dictatorships.)

To lay out the context in which this can and does happen, I will give you some examples of how ineffectual the UN is in upholding human rights, and how UN Human Rights Council members – who hold a rotating seat for three years – regularly get away with flouting human rights in their own countries. Which begs the question: What is the point of the UN Human Rights Council?

Let me start with Saudi Arabia, a country that has been accused of curtailing women’s rights and freedoms and of killing the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi Arabia was a member of the UN Human Rights Council when Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. In June 2019, Agnes Callamard, the then UN Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, released a report that implicated Saudi prince Mohamed bin Salman for the murder of Khashoggi. Her calls to carry out an international criminal investigation went unheeded, with the Saudi regime insisting that it would carry out its own investigations. For his part, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, simply passed the buck for such an investigation to the UN Security Council. (UN Rapporteurs do not work for the UN though they are appointed by the UN to play an oversight role.) But anyone who knows the workings of the UN Security Council would know that any such resolution would never pass, as the United States, Saudi Arabia’s main ally, would veto it.

Moreover, member states of the UN know that buying the silence of the UN is relatively easy. In March 2018, six months before Khashoggi’s murder, the UN received a donation of one billion US dollars from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ostensibly towards UN efforts to alleviate a humanitarian crisis in Yemen, a crisis that would have never occurred if a Saudi-led coalition had not bombed Yemen in the first place. Perhaps this is why Guterres did not come out openly and condemn Saudi Arabia for its actions. This is not unusual. During his tenure, Guterres’s predecessor, Ban Ki-moon, reluctantly admitted that he had removed Saudi Arabia from a list of countries that violated children’s rights. Ban was also accused by human rights organisations of succumbing to pressure from the US and Israel to keep the latter off the list, even though his special representative on children and armed conflict had recommended that Israel be placed on the list for killing more than 500 Palestinian children in Gaza in 2014.

This could be the reason why, even as the world witnesses in real time the horrors unleashed by Israel in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, the UN is reluctant to condemn Isreal, but only calls for humanitarian assistance to the affected people. Yet, the US and most European countries are quick to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine. These countries also refuse to use the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, preferring to skirt around the issue by framing the crisis as one that can be solved through technical and political interventions.

Last month, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly for Israel to end its “unlawful presence” in the Occupied Palestinian territories and to abide by international law. But we must remember that UN General Assembly resolutions are non-binding. Member states can choose not to abide by them. Both the General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council have in the past condemned Isreal for its treatment of Palestinians, but their resolutions are routinely ignored by Israel. Which leads me to my second question: What is the point of the UN if it cannot force a member state to abide by international law?

The US itself is in not averse to invading and destroying countries. In March 2003, the US and Britain decided to invade Iraq on the pretext that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction”, and had links to al-Qaeda. (Both claims were found to be untrue.) The UN Security Council – the body entrusted to prevent wars from occurring or escalating – could do absolutely nothing to prevent this war.

It could not even impose sanctions on the US and Britain because both countries are permanent veto-holding members of the Security Council. That war led to massive devastation and destruction. It is estimated that nearly a million Iraqis lost their lives. The havoc this senseless war resulted in is being felt in Iraq even today.

Often when a country breaks into conflict, the UN Security Council is quick to send UN peacekeepers to that country to quell the violence. However, UN peacekeeping missions have also spelt disaster for countries in which they are stationed. The conflicts don’t seem to subside and there is also widespread sexual abuse and exploitation of the people being protected.

Sexual abuse of women and children by UN peacekeepers was first documented in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Cambodia and Kosovo in the early 1990s. UN peacekeepers were not only accused of sexually abusing women but also of engaging in paedophilia. Currently there are 13 peacekeeping missions around the world, mostly in African countries. MONUSCO, the UN’s stabilising mission in the DRC, has deployed thousands of troops to the country. Yet, the DRC remains the site of much conflict as militias and government troops fight over who gets to control mineral-rich areas. Militias also routinely use rape as a weapon of war. DRC is often described as “the rape capital of the world”. Yet, the UN General Assembly thought it deserved a seat at the UN Human Rights Council.

Haiti is another country that has suffered at the hands of UN peacekeepers. In 2017, the Associated Press reported that at least 134 Sri Lankan UN peacekeepers had exploited nine children in a sex ring from 2004 to 2007. One of the victims said that the soldiers would pass her number to incoming contingents, who would then call her for sex. One boy claimed that he had had sex with more than 20 Sri Lankan soldiers. Another teenage boy claimed that he had been gang-raped by Uruguayan soldiers. Although 114 of these peacekeepers were sent home after the report came out, none of them faced trial in their own countries.

One reason why UN peacekeepers evade consequences for their actions is that under the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated between the UN and troop-contributing countries, UN peacekeepers fall under the exclusive jurisdiction of the country they come from. The UN can request disciplinary action against the peacekeepers, but it has no authority to take action against the abusers. This responsibility falls on the troop-contributing country. But cases never reach a court. Countries choose to ignore the allegations.

In many instances, the UN too ignores accusations of sexual abuse. In 2014, a UN whistleblower who exposed cases of sexual abuse of boys by French peacekeepers in the Central African Republic was severely reprimanded by the UN for “unauthorised disclosure of confidential information”. An inquiry held later found that the UN had failed to investigate the cases and to protect the abused boys. The whistleblower eventually resigned from his job, citing frustration. To this day, no one knows the fate of the abused children.

In my book, Lords of Impunity, I call for a transformation of the UN so that it can live up to its mandate and be more accountable to the citizens of the world. However, after witnessing the horrific genocide of Gazans and the levelling of their homes and cities, I am convinced that perhaps the UN is beyond transformation or reform. If the US and Israel can unilaterally decide who lives or who dies in this world, and suffer no sanctions, then we are truly living in terrifying times. Which leads me to my third question: If the five permanent veto-holding powers of the UN Security Council (that comprise the US, Britain, France, Russia and China) can do pretty much what they want without suffering any repercussions, then what is the point of the Security Council?

The preamble of the UN Charter, adopted after the Second World War in 1945, states: “We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights…” It is clear that the UN itself has failed to live up to its charter. It failed to prevent a genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and has failed to prevent the unfolding genocide of Palestinians. Meanwhile, the US continues to supply billions of dollars worth of arms to Israel, despite widespread protests around the world to stop the arms supply. How can the world believe that the US stands for human rights when its government is complicit in this mass slaughter of innocent civilians, the majority of whom are women and children?

Perhaps it is time to dismantle the UN and think of new mechanisms to bring about peace and security in this world.

© Rasna Warah 2024
 

Rasna is a Kenyan writer and journalist. In a previous incarnation, she was an editor at the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). She has published two books on Somalia – War Crimes (2014) and Mogadishu Then and Now (2012) – and is the author UNsilenced (2016), and Triple Heritage (1998). Article shared with author’s approval
 

AW Kamau 2024