Sitting down with bloody despots

IF the Obama administration really wants to improve human rights, it's taking the wrong approach in seeking a seat on the seriously flawed United Nations Human Rights Council.

The best thing now, ironically, would be for the HRC to show its true colors and reject Washington's application in the vote it plans for Tuesday -- although don't count on it.

The administration says it's aiming to "promote universality, transparency and objectivity" in the council, but more likely its presence simply would legitimize a body hostile to democracy and human rights.

The Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to supersede its corrupt predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, which at its end counted six of the most politically repressive regimes -- Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, China and Vietnam -- as members. Iran, a country known for "honor-killings" of wives and daughters, headed its women's rights committee; Saddam Hussein's representative once presided over its disarmament panel.

A satirist could scarcely conceive so perverse a record, but its successor has equaled it.

Because the new body's membership has been reduced to 47 from 54 countries and a greater emphasis is placed on geographical distribution, fewer democracies and more autocracies are represented.

True, the council can suspend members for human-rights abuses, but that requires approval by a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly -- which has been unable to muster a simple majority merely to condemn the genocide in Sudan. It's a worthless measure.

In just three years, the council's controlling membership has eliminated probes into the most serious human-rights abuses in Belarus, Congo, Cuba, Liberia and Sudan. In that time, some 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced in Darfur alone.

Asian and African autocracies have also acted in tandem to minimize scrutiny of nations like Zimbabwe, a veritable human-rights Enron.

So what has the council been doing? Following the dubious path of its predecessor by fixating on Israel, the Middle East's lone democracy. Israel has been the subject of 26 of the council's 33 resolutions, even while human-rights abusers serenely occupy its seats, as before.

Some say US participation in the council could help prompt a shift toward fulfilling the noble aspirations for which it was presumably intended. But any such efforts are likely doomed to fail, as non-democratic African and Asian regimes exercise an unbreakable controlling majority of 26 of 47 seats.

It's true that Western countries participate in many UN bodies beholden to anti-democratic majorities in attempts to mitigate their worst deficiencies.

But that debatably useful function is unlikely to bear fruit here. Any US effort to do something constructive on the council would bring it into collision with Third World tyrants and even major powers it's wooing -- like Russia, which provides cover for Iran, and China, which does the same for Sudan.

This seems to suggest that, unless the Obama administration is determined to effect change regardless of such opposition, any role it plays on the council would necessarily be half-hearted, inconsistent or otherwise compromised.

History is full of surprises. There's a slim chance US participation might produce some good. Assuming America is elected to the council on Tuesday, the administration must adopt a strict timetable for producing clear benchmarks. If results aren't seen, Washington should withdraw.

Daniel Mandel is a fellow in history at Melbourne University.