THE office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has grown rapidly since its establishment in 1994. It now has 450 staff, 400 field projects throughout the world and a budget of £30 million.
The High Commissioner for Human Rights is the UN official with primary responsibility for UN human rights activities. While his or her department is comparatively small in UN terms, the High Commissioner ranks highly within the UN hierarchy as one of about a dozen under secretaries general, the rank directly below the Secretary General.
The office had just 12 projects when the present High Commissioner, Mr Jose Ayalo Lasso of Ecuador, took office in April 1994. Its budget was then just over £15 million, but Mr Ayalo Lasso brought it up to its present level through successfully soliciting voluntary funding, which now accounts for almost half the £30 million budget. The remainder comes directly from the UN.
The office has some 200 staff at its Geneva headquarters and 250 in the field. It has a particularly large human rights monitoring operation in Rwanda and also works in Burundi, Colombia, Abkhazskaya, Georgia and elsewhere. It is planning an operation in Cambodia. It is a department of the UN rather than an agency such as the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The post of High Commissioner was established by UN General Assembly resolution 48/141 of December 1993. From its birth, the post was the subject of tension between the competing views of human rights held by the western world on one aside and the developing and Asian countries on the other.
That tension is between the western concentration on the rights of the individual to free speech, freedom from torture, fair trials and freedom of conscience, and the Asian and African emphasis on the rights of the community, the right to social and economic development.
There is also a resentment in developing countries against what they see as a western style of confrontation and challenge on such issues.
MANY western enthusiasts for a stronger UN line on human rights were privately critical of Mr Ayalo Lasso who, they maintained, took too "softly softly" an approach to criticising human rights abuses. But says one UN observer: "He might have been criticised for doing too little. A strong western candidate might be criticised for doing too much."
The UN resolution establishing the High Commissioner post gave a long list of the Commissioner's functions that did not come down on either side of this debate.
It listed as specific responsibilities: "to promote and protect the effective enjoyment by all of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights, including the right to development to provide advisory services, technical and financial assistance in the field of human rights to States that request them to co ordinate United Nations Education and Public information programmes in the field of human rights to play an active role in removing the full obstacles to the full realisation of human rights and in preventing the continuation of human rights violations throughout the world to engage in a dialogue with governments in order to secure respect for human rights to enhance international co operation for the promotion and protection of human rights to co ordinate human rights promotion and protection activities throughout the United Nations system to rationalise, adapt, strengthen and streamline the United Nations machinery in the field of human rights in order improve its efficiency and effectiveness."
While the post includes a considerable number of executive and managerial functions, a source in the Commission said last night that Mrs Robinson's lack of such experience would not disqualify her from the job.