09/19/07- Cuba-L Analysis (Albuquerque) -
Will the U.S.Downgrade Human Rights Commission
in this Year of No Censure Against Cuba?
Robert Sandels
At the end of August, the Cuban government invited UN Human Rights Council rapporteur Jean Ziegler to visit the island in October. The United States has regularly heaped criticism on Cuba for refusing to accept rapporteur visits mandated by the council and by its predecessor the Commission on Human Rights. The "what-do-you-have-to-hide" question has been a mainstay in the arsenal of US rhetorical onslaughts against the island.
Logically then, the invitation would seem to be a victory for the United States in its campaign to portray Cuba as a habitual human rights offender. In fact, it is a victory for Cuba in its campaign to change the way the UN defines and examines human rights around the world.
The Bush administration can not be happy about getting its wish because Ziegler, who specializes in the right to food, has already spoken approvingly of Cuba's food policy.[1]
During the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the human rights component of US foreign policy ceased to be a matter of seeking justice and became a strategy to keep Cuba and other countries in a permanent state of vilification, with the Commission on Human Rights as the weapon of choice.
The United States began pressing the commission to condemn Cuba in 1987, and in 2002, the commission mandated a permanent review of human rights in Cuba appointing French jurist Christine Chanet as rapporteur. But Cuba never allowed her into the country arguing that rapporteurs represented US interests and pandered to an incorrect image of Cuba portrayed in Washington and the corporate media. At the same time, the US prison at Guantanamo, secret detention facilities around the world, rendition of terror suspects to countries known to use torture and the general flouting of US judicial standards has not received the scrutiny that Cuba has.
Media distortions
In reporting on the Ziegler invitation, the major foreign news outlets, with few exceptions, misrepresented the history of Cuba's relationship with the commission. Deutsche Presse-Agentur said the invitation meant the end of a "20-year boycott of UN human rights experts."[2] Twenty years would mean Cuba never allowed rapporteurs into the country since the US effort to impose them began 20 years ago.
Agence-France Presse was even more categorical; no rapporteur had ever been invited to Cuba, it claimed.[3]
In fact, UN rapporteurs and representatives of human rights NGOs have visited Cuba many times. When the United States failed in its first attempt to condemn Cuba in 1987, Cuba responded by inviting the commission to send a rapporteur. Then as now, Cuba has tried to demonstrate its willingness to cooperate with the UN on human rights, but not under pressure from the United States. Cuba's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Raul Roa-Kouri said in 1987 that Cuba refused "to be put on the stand" by the United States.[4]
The first rapporteur visit took place the following year, and in 1994, Cuba invited the human rights high commissioner. In 1995, a delegation representing France Liberte, the International Human Rights Leagues Federation, Doctors of the World and Human Rights Watch visited Cuba. In 1999, two teams of rapporteurs were invited, one on the use of mercenaries and the other on violence against women.[5]
Rights commission scrapped
The commission came to be seen widely the way Cuba saw it - as a selective exercise furthering US policy. Referring to the commission's penchant for condemning Belarus, Cuba, Myanmar and North Korea, then human rights High Commissioner Louise Arbour said, "There is something fundamentally wrong with a system in which the question of the violation of human rights ... is answered by reference to just four states."[6]
But the United States came to regard the commission as hopelessly infected by the presence on the panel of Cuba and other "rogue states."
The new council, established in 2006, reduces slightly the influence of the US and its Western European allies, who are lumped together in a permanent geographical minority grouping called Western Europe and Other States. (The US is an "other.") The rest of the members are in groupings that give majority voice to developing countries is Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Joining Cuba in the latter group are Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, which are now aligned with Cuba and the movement toward Latin American integration and independence from US policies.
Washington and the US media have deplored practically everything the new council has done, especially the package of proposals approved in June, which includes procedural rules and a requirement that all council members must face a review of their own human rights records. But most upsetting for the United States were the decisions to continuously monitor Israel's behavior in the Palestinian territories, and to discontinue mandated inquiries into human rights in Belarus and Cuba.[7]
The vote on the package was 46-1, the lone dissenting vote cast by Canada. Six council members from the European Union, ostensible friends of the United States, voted with the majority.
After the vote was taken on Belarus and Cuba, Cuba's representative Juan Antonio Fernandez Palacios said, "The curtain will soon come down and put an end to this grotesque spectacle."[8]
The Los Angeles Times led off an editorial on the subject with the headline, "At U.N. abusers in charge," but balanced this by saying the United States was "in no position to criticize."[9]
Query for the Times: If the United States is also a human rights abuser, why did the Times never say abusers were in charge in previous human-rights sessions where the United States sat in judgment of others?
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), an anti-Castro stalwart, wants to halt funding for the council in retaliation.[10] There is some logic in this. If the United States isn't getting the results it paid for, why continue to pay? And why be a member of a council that is going to examine the US rights record should it take a seat on the panel?
Even before the council gets around to examining human rights in the United States, the multitude of violations has not gone unnoticed. While the State Department was issuing its annual assessment of everyone else's rights record, the council issued a report highly critical of the United States for arbitrary arrests, terrorist profiling based on race and nationality, restrictions on constitutional rights, secret prisons and other abuses that have multiplied in the name of a war on terror.[11]
In May, rapporteur Jorge Bustamante reported on a visit to the US concerning the rights of immigrants. He noted a number of serious abuses in immigrant detentions centers, two of which he was not allowed to visit.[12]
Investigating Cuba by remote control
Chanet's mandate came to an end when the commission was replaced by the Human Rights Council. Here is what she wrote in her final report on Cuba covering 2006: "We are at an impasse. It is the fifth time that I have presented a report on Cuba to the Commission and now the Council of Human Rights. But nothing changes. The [Cuban] authorities refuse to co-operate and renewing my mandate every year has no sense. It can't continue like this, but on the other hand we can not abandon Cubans to their fate."[13]
Although Chanet has never been allowed into Cuba she has made annual reports on what goes on there. In each report, she ventures assurances that human rights are regularly abused in Cuba.
Of course, if Chanet knows what is going on inside Cuba, why does she need to go there? Like the annual State Department reports, Chanet harvests much of her information from Cuban dissidents paid by the United States, released convicts, family and friends of convicts, plus reports by other rapporteurs and human rights organizations that have no access either.
Typical of these human rights organizations is the Geneva-based International Service for Human Rights, which cites an array of sources it consults on Cuba. Virtually all of them are anti-Castro NGO's that receive US government funding. These include the Center for a Free Cuba, the Directorio Democratico Cubano, and the US government propaganda outlet Radio Marti.[14]
Thus, Chanet finds her data in organizations that find their data in other organizations that have no first-hand knowledge of the human rights situation in Cuba. The Directorio, for example, lists among its sources tainted and even discredited organizations such as Reporters without Borders, an organization still taken seriously by some journalists but effectively exposed as a paid agency of the United States.[15]
The council's rules for rapporteurs require them to use "objective and dependable facts" based on appropriate evidentiary standards and that the information "should not be manifestly unfounded or politically motivated."[16]
Objectivity never got in the way of Chanet's remote observations. The US embargo, she writes, has "serious impacts in terms of the civil and political rights of Cuban citizens by provoking a reaction on the part of the Cuban authorities, who take the opportunity offered by a foreign State's interference in Cuban domestic policy to adopt repressive laws, [italics added] such as Act No. 88 on 'protection of Cuba's national and economic independence.'"[17]
Are we to conclude from this that the Cuban government is to blame for any harm done by the United States to the civil and political rights of Cubans? When Cuba reacts against US efforts to flagellate its people until they revolt against the government, Chanet sees it as opportunism.
Council flaws
It is probably safe to say the United States has failed in its 20-year operation to flog Cuba with endless UN condemnations. Cuban officials are now saying that Cuba is willing to invite Ziegler and resume cooperation with the council precisely because it ended the selective application of pressure on Cuba by removing the rapporteur mandate.[18]
In July, a Senate subcommittee invited three biased witnesses to explain why the council was not working out the way the United States wished. The witnesses were Kristin Silverberg, assistant secretary of state for International Organization Affairs; Thomas Melia of Freedom House, an organization partly funded by the United States Agency for International Development; and Peggy Hicks, representing Human Rights Watch, which has not always been evenhanded in its attitude toward Cuba.
Despite their obvious biases, Hicks and Melia told the panel with unusual frankness that the United States, through ineptness, got the council it deserved.
What is more likely, it got the council it wanted. What Hicks and Melia implied but did not say was that the incompetent and destructive diplomacy of John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, seemed designed to undermine any consensus that might have resulted during negotiations on the shape of the new council.
Scott Paul of the Bolton Watch blog wrote that at every turn, "Bolton blew the consensus apart," first by submitting 750 changes in the draft proposal at the last minute, then by demanding permanent seats on the council for the United States and all the other permanent members of the Security Council, then by absenting himself from negotiations for months.[19]
Limits of democracy
US objections to the council and its operations boil down to a fundamental reluctance to accept unwanted outcomes of democratic processes. During negotiations over how to restructure the old commission, the US pressed for procedures that would exclude from membership on the panel any state it considered a human rights abuser. As the annual State Department reports on human rights show, the United States is highly selective and often disingenuous in its judgments.
Sec. Silverberg explained to the Senate that the council was fatally flawed from the start because instead of reporting to the Economic and Social Council as did the commission, the council reports to the General Assembly, which makes decisions by majority vote. That means, said Silverberg, that the council's "geographic distribution mirrors the substantial Asian and African membership of its parent body."[20]
And so, it seems that the obstacle to having a proper human rights council is majority rule. Majority rule explains why so many members (28) of the council were also members of the Non-Aligned Movement, which Silverberg describes as "a group that typically supports economic, social and cultural rights over civil and political liberties."
Silverberg does not explain why exposing abuses of economic, social and cultural rights is a less noble endeavor than eternal vigilance against abuses of civil and political rights.
In the case of Cuba, the answer may be that it is easier to claim as fact abuses of civil and political liberties as alleged by politicized and unreliable sources than it is to claim Cuba has failed to provided for the education and feeding of its population.
Finally, the State Department has identified those responsible for devising a flawed council that was admittedly the product of democratic processes. According to Silverberg, "the primary responsibility lies with Member States," and not the UN itself.[21]
But was it not the General Assembly that established the council? It's hard to argue that the vote lacked a democratic character since only four countries voted against the council- the United States, Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands - while 170 voted for it, many of which Silverberg would surely classify as democracies.
As for the council's member states, upon whom Silverberg lays the blame for the council's failures, they were all elected by secret ballot by a majority of the General Assembly. According to calculations by Freedom House, the number of "free" nations on the council is greater than it was on the commission (55% as compared with 45%). The number Freedom House considers democracies increased from 62% on the commission to 76% on the council.[22]
In the end, Bolton's guerrilla negotiating style effectively eliminated US influence on the final structure of the council, which in turn, justified the decision not to seek membership on it. Since then, the State Department has begun suggesting it would take its human rights strategy somewhere else where it could get a better hearing.
Silverberg signaled the US intention to bypass UN agencies with their inconvenient majority voting rules to work through organizations Washington supports or even created. "We must redouble our efforts," she said, "to work in effective fora on behalf of the world's vulnerable people."[23]
One of the organizations the State Department likes is the Community of Democracies, organized in 2000 for "democracy promotion." It is a creation of the US government, partly funded by taxpayer supported NGOs and the Nation Endowment for Democracy.[24]
Notes [1] Ziegler has also called the US blockade of Cuba "genocide." Granma (Habana), 03/21/05 [2] Deutsche Presse-Agentur, 02/31/05 [3] Agence-France Presse, 9/31/07 [4] UN Chronicle, 06/98, <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1309/is_n2_v25/ai_6 621256> [5] Despite Cuba's very critical response to rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy's 1999 report on violence against women in Cuba, it was far more favorable than her report the previous year on the same subject on the US. It was a scathing condemnation of every imaginable abuse against women in US prisons. See note from the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 03/08/00. <http://www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/8b3a8f07d17f7ddd80256673003934e7/14e7e1f4a051fa5e802568dd0054e5e2?OpenDocument> [6] Reuters, 04/22/05 [7] Report to the General Assembly of the Fifth Session of the Council, Annex, Arts.8(c), 9(a), 08/07/07, <http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/5session/A.HRC.5.21_AEV> [8] Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX), 06/14/07 [9] The Los Angeles Times, 06/22/07 [10] Associated Press, 06/19/07 [11] Preliminary Findings on Visit to United States, 05/29/07. <http://www.unhrch.ch/huricane/huricane/nst/view01/>, [12] UN press release, 05/17/07. <http://www.unhchr.ch/huricane/huricane.nsf/view01/BA409950651325ECC12572E2002845A5?/> [13] Human Rights Tribune (Geneva), 06/14/07, <www.humanrightsgeneva.info/> [14] Human Rights Work in Cuba, International Society for Human Rights, 08/28/07, <http://www.ishr.org/index.php?id=873 [15] Salim Lamrani, The Lies of Reporters without Borders, voltairenet, 09/09/05, <http://www.voltairenet.org/articles127688.html> [16] Report to the General Assembly of the Fifth Session of the Council, Annex, Arts.8(c), 9(a), 08/07/07, <http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/5session/A.HRC.5.21_AEV> [17] For text, see http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR2501172003 [18] Cuba's ambassador to the UN, Juan Antonio Fernandez Palacios said, "The country is ready to resume co-operation with the UN on human rights, given the changes that have taken place in the organization." Cuba Headlines Digital Edition, Havana, 08/31/07. <http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2007/08/31/5502/> [19] Bolton Watch, 02/23/05. <http://www.boltonwatch.com/> [20] Silverberg, Statement to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Democracy and Human Rights Washington, DC, 07/26/07 http://www.state.gov/p/io/rls/89505.htm [21] Ibid. [22] Melia, Statement to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Democracy and Human Rights Washington, DC, 07/26/07 http://www.state.gov/p/io/rls/89505.htm [23] Silverberg statement [24] For a discussion of this and similar organizations see Tom Barry, World Movement of Democracy, More than a Luckless Acronym? Inter Press Service 07/07/07. <http://www.irc-online.org>