The outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has made human rights one of the main themes of his eight-year term in office. He well knows this cannot be only an abstract universal commitment, but involves difficult decisions affecting individuals in particular political circumstances.
In a farewell speech he has sharply and justifiably criticised African governments for resisting the "responsibility to protect" populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity agreed last year as a concrete means to implement the commitment. The failure to do so has been most marked in Darfur, where up to four million people are faced with just such threats and the UN is powerless to help them.
This disgraceful state of affairs affronts Mr Annan's record in office, when he has tried to establish human rights as a third pillar of the UN system, on a par with development and security. He candidly admitted this is so in his speech to the international NGO Human Rights Watch. Even though the doctrine of a responsibility to protect was one of the major outcomes of last year's world summit on UN reform, he admits that the record shows not much has changed since the disasters of Bosnia and Rwanda. "Sixty years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and 30 years after the Cambodian killing fields, the promise of 'never again' is ringing hollow", he said. He blames many African states for putting sovereignty ahead of the suffering of real families, and especially the "utterly false"argument that imperialist powers are using it to take back the sovereignty of formerly colonised peoples.
This badly needs saying at a time when the Sudanese government is strenuously resisting the installation of a strengthened African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur in the name of sovereignty. It denies a humanitarian crisis is taking place there. Another outgoing UN official, the under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland, said the world is "sadly still far away" from seeing the responsibility to protect translated into protection "for all beleaguered and threatened communities irrespective of time, place and circumstance", especially in Darfur, even though he acknowledged recent progress in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Congo.
Another UN reform last year set up the Human Rights Council. Mr Annan criticised its concentration on Israeli violations to the virtual exclusion of all others. This week it is holding a special session on Sudan, but its terms utterly disregard the scale of the suffering there and the huge gap between what is required to deal with it and what is on offer.
Such issues demand more political and media attention to the UN system. It is frequently an opaque, unaccountable bureaucracy dominated by regional groups, as in Darfur. Mr Annan has done a lot to make the UN an organisation that serves individual people, but admits there is a still a mountain to climb.