U.S. to wait until next year to seek seat on U.N. Human Rights Council

UNITED NATIONS -- The United States said Thursday it will not seek a seat on the new U.N. Human Rights Council this year, a decision that drew strong criticism from rights groups and members of Congress.

The United States was virtually alone among the 191 U.N. member states in opposing the 47-nation council's creation last month. State Department officials said the U.S. would wait until next year before pursuing a seat.

"There are strong candidates ... with long records of support for human rights that voted in favor of the resolution creating the council," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. "They should have an opportunity to run."

People with knowledge of the decision-making process that led to Thursday's announcement said the Bush administration, criticized for alleged abuses in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, also feared it would not get the necessary 96 votes to win a seat.

U.S. officials had raised the possibility of U.S. defeat during a confidential U.S. National Security Council meeting earlier this week, said one person who was at the meeting and spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the closed session.

'It's childish'

Human rights groups criticized the decision, noting the United States had long worked with the discredited Commission on Human Rights, the body the council replaced.

"It's childish for the U.S. government not to cooperate with the new Human Rights Council when it cooperated for decades with the vastly inferior old Commission on Human Rights," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

They also said the U.S. assessment that it might not get enough votes contrasted with the U.S. line during negotiations earlier this year, when U.S. Ambassador John Bolton had lobbied hard for members to be elected by a two-thirds majority of the General Assembly.

In an online State Department chat in late March, Bolton had argued the absolute majority of 96 votes wasn't enough to keep rights abusers off the new council.

35 candidates

So far, 35 countries have declared their candidacy to be members of the council, including Cuba and Iran.

McCormack said the United States would still support and finance the council. He pledged the United States would also encourage it to address "serious cases of human rights abuse in countries such as Iran, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and North Korea."

Secretary-General Kofi Annan "is obviously disappointed" by the U.S. decision, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

"However, we very much hope that the U.S. will continue to be an active player in the defense of universal human rights and support the work of the new Human Rights Council as it goes ahead, and we also very much hope they will participate in the elections next year," he said.

The council's predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, was criticized because countries with terrible human rights records used their membership to protect one another from condemnation. Commission members in recent years included Sudan, Libya, Zimbabwe and Cuba.

The new council was endorsed by key human rights groups, a dozen Nobel Peace Prize laureates including former President Carter, and 170 countries who voted "yes" on the resolution -- including a surprise endorsement from Cuba.

In voting no, Bolton argued the new council wasn't big enough to be an improvement over the commission. Staunch U.S. allies Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands also voted against its creation.

Many members of Congress -- including Henry Hyde, the Republican chairman of the House International Relations Committee, and Tom Lantos, the body's ranking Democrat -- had urged the United States to join.

"This decision represents a major retrenchment in America's long struggle to advance the cause of human rights around the world," Lantos said in a statement Thursday.

As a result of its absence, the United States will miss much of the work in the first year that will help define the methods of the new council.

To ensure global representation, Africa and Asia will have 13 seats each, Latin America and the Caribbean eight seats, Western nations seven seats and Eastern Europe six seats.

The United States would have run against eight countries that have already announced their candidacies: Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal and Switzerland.

Under the rules for the new council, countries serve a maximum of two three-year terms and must leave the council before running again. In the first few years, however, some members will only serve one or two years.