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U.S.
ambassador to U.N. calls for reform after election of rights
violator
By Charles W. Corey
Washington File Staff Writer
April 29, 2005
Washington -- The United States is “dismayed” that
Zimbabwe was elected a member of the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights and finds such a result “unacceptable,”
the acting U.S. representative to the United Nations stressed
April 28.
Ambassador Anne W. Patterson told the press after the election
that the United States considers the election of Zimbabwe to
a body that “is supposed to maintain the highest standards
of human rights compliance in the world” to be “totally
inappropriate.”
“It is simply unacceptable that countries like Zimbabwe
sit on the Human Rights Commission,” she said. “What's
wrong with Zimbabwe is its repressive press, [its] electoral
process and its generally repressive government.”
Patterson said efforts have been under way to reform the commission.
“This is one of the issues outlined in the secretary-general's
report” on the matter, she explained, adding that the
elections of known human rights violators are good examples
of why the entire human rights machinery of the United Nations
needs reform.
Asked to detail the U.S. position on U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan's effort to reform the commission, Patterson said:
“We believe that the Human Rights Commission needs exceedingly
widespread reform. He has certainly presented a number of interesting
and useful ideas, and we'll be looking at them closely."
Citing the fact that China sits on the U.N. Human Rights Commission,
a reporter asked whether it was hypocritical to castigate the
election of Zimbabwe to the panel when the United States recently
voted in Geneva on a resolution to denounce China's human rights
violations.
Patterson responded that the permanent members of the Security
Council are automatically accorded seats on all U.N. bodies,
but the issue in this instance was the election of “countries
like Zimbabwe and, in previous years, Sudan, and, of course,
Cuba … human rights violators of the first order,”
to the commission.
Patterson acknowledged that Zimbabwe “was chosen by its
peers,” but cited it as “one of the things that
is wrong with the system, because regional groups put up slates
of their neighbors and they're elected with basically very little
discussion.”
Zimbabwe was among 15 countries chosen April 28 to sit for the
next three years on the 53-member commission.
Although members of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights are
elected by the U.N. Economic and Social Council, seats are allotted
to regional groupings, which often put forward most of the candidates
without opposition. |
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