Libya Elected to UN Human Rights Body

With the election of Libya, a nation awarded the lowest possible ratings for political and civil liberties, to a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, the time has come to ask if the UNHRC has finally run its course.

On 14 May, Libya won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), however it was not much of a competition - Libya ran unopposed (together with 13 other nations, including Angola, Malaysia and Qatar - all of whom have questionable human rights records and were also elected unopposed).

In its 2010 Freedom in the World annual survey, Freedom House awarded Libya the lowest possible rating for both political and civil liberties (others in this category included Sudan and North Korea).

Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva based NGO, UN Watch, headed a diverse global coalition of 37 human rights groups that fought to defeat Libya’s candidacy, with appeals urging the US and the EU to lead an opposition campaign. Unfortunately, that campaign fell on deaf ears.

Following Libya’s election, Neuer said:

by electing serial human rights violators, the U.N. violates its own criteria as well as common sense. Choosing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to judge others on human rights is a joke… he’ll use the position not to promote human rights but to shield his record of abuse, and those of his allies…

The UNHRC was created in 2006, with a specific task to create a new body to tackle human rights abuses, in light of its discredited predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights. The Commission was largely criticised for its one-sided obsession with Israel and the make up of its members, which included, amongst others, such human rights luminaries as Cuba, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and China. It was argued that this created impunity for the world’s worst human rights abusers and prevented the Commission from helping those in real need of its assistance. Even former Secretary General Kofi Annan, said the Commission had a “fatal credibility deficit” that was casting “a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

Tragically however, with the election of Libya, a gross abuser of human rights and supporter of terrorism, the new UNHRC makes a complete mockery of human rights and appears to be no different to its discredited predecessor. The question must now be asked whether the UNHRC has also run its course?