US: The Bush administration is determined to force its way to the centre of decision-making at the United Nations, writes Colum Lynch
John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has said that he will start the new year by reinvigorating stalled efforts to restructure management of the organisation, beginning with a controversial push to seek assurances that the Security Council's five major powers will be guaranteed posts on a new Human Rights Council.
Bolton said in an interview that the Bush administration wants to ensure that the United States is never again denied membership in the United Nations' principal human rights body, as it was in 2001, when Austria, France and Sweden defeated a US bid for membership of the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission.
His initiative would also boost efforts by China and Russia, two permanent council members with troubled records on human rights, to gain membership of the new body.
The proposal is part of a broader drive by Bolton to place the five permanent members of the Security Council - Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States - at the centre of UN decision-making.
However, an official involved in the negotiations warned that creating fresh privileges for the council's most powerful states "would turn off a large chunk of the membership".
Bolton said one of his main priorities for 2006 will be rallying council support for new initiatives to combat terrorism and the spread of the world's deadliest weapons. Last month, he helped to secure permanent posts for the "P-5" countries on a new UN peace-building commission established to oversee post-conflict reconstruction efforts throughout the world.
"It's called the 'perm 5 convention'. It's not written down anywhere - it's not a treaty or anything like that," Bolton said. "It has been a convention operating also from the beginning of the United Nations that the perm 5 serve on all standing bodies of the UN that they want to serve on, in exchange for the perm 5 almost never seeking chairmanships of any bodies."
Bolton said that convention should apply to membership in the new Human Rights Council, which he hopes will block the worst human rights violators from using posts on the council to deflect or prevent criticism of their rights records.
The new council would replace the present 53-member Human Rights Commission, which drafted the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights under Eleanor Roosevelt's leadership but which now routinely grants membership to governments with abysmal human rights records, including Cuba, Libya, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
The Bush administration favours a requirement that most members of the new council be selected by a two-thirds vote from the 191-member UN General Assembly, diminishing the prospects for rights violators. Candidates for the Human Rights Commission are at present selected by a system of regional rotation which makes no distinction between rights advocates and abusers.
Bolton said that the new rights body would not necessarily need to enshrine the membership privileges of the United States and other major council powers in its charter. But he indicated that he would seek some informal "understanding" that they would be granted automatic membership if they chose to serve.
"Any UN body without the perm 5 is just not going to be as effective as a UN body with the perm 5, and that is reality," he said.
Bolton's initiative was criticised by some UN diplomats, human rights advocates and others, who said that it would reward China and Russia, which are often criticised for rights abuses.
"If that is the only way to ensure the United States can be on the Human Rights Council, is that the kind of organisation we want to be committed to?" asked Joseph Loconte, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. "I'm dubious."
Others expressed concern that Bolton's comments would undermine the sensitive diplomatic talks which are due to resume next week on how to create a new rights council.
"My biggest concern is that it would be a divisive factor in the negotiations," said Peggy Hicks, the global advocacy director for the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Bolton challenged his critics, saying: "A lot of people mistakenly think that what we are after as part of our reform priority is just management reform . . . That is a piece, an important piece, but only a piece of the larger picture, which also encompasses governance reform.
"The Human Rights Commission is the aspect of governance reform that obviously is ripest and that we have been pressing hardest on, and it reflects the almost universal belief that the Human Rights Commission's inter-governmental decision-making machinery is broken beyond repair."
He said that the US was also sharpening its strategy for forthcoming negotiations on UN management changes.
Bolton welcomed a recent UN decision to strengthen its policy protecting whistle-blowers as "20 years overdue", but said that another UN initiative to reinforce its auditing capacity to prevent corruption did not go far enough.
He said that he had assembled a "matrix" of recommendations for revisions proposed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who led an 18-month investigation into allegations of UN corruption and mismanagement in Iraq.
"We're going to continue to pursue those, number one, because we think the Volcker commission made a lot of recommendations that have not yet been addressed and that should be," he said.
"And, number two, Congress is not going to leave this alone."