Minding the Minders

The UN makes a very big deal out of its role in protecting human rights around the world. Don’t take my word for it; take theirs:

The term “human rights” was mentioned seven times in the UN’s founding Charter, making the promotion and protection of human rights a key purpose and guiding principle of the Organization. In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights brought human rights into the realm of international law.  Since then, the Organization has diligently protected human rights through legal instruments and on-the-ground activities.

There are a number of UN offices tasked with issues relating to human rights, as you can see in that link: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Human Rights Council, Special Advisers on Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect, etc. Along with the International Criminal Court, which is related to the UN in that the UN Security Council is allowed to refer cases to it, the UN itself is one of the few truly global organizations that is heavily invested in human rights work.

There’s a bit of controversy surrounding the issue of human rights these days, in that so much of the Western world’s attention when it comes to human rights issues seems to be devoted to stuff that’s happening in Africa. Which, you know, there are a lot of human rights abuses happening in Africa, but then there are a lot of human rights abuses happening just about anywhere you turn at any given time. The ICC comes in for a lot of grief over the fact that all but one of the 36 indictments it’s issued since its inception in 2002 has been for an African man, and the one that wasn’t was for an African woman. Admittedly, as that article points out, the ICC is somewhat hampered by the fact that it can’t pursue cases in countries that haven’t ratified the treaty that created it, unless the Security Council authorizes it, and so the UN is thus also implicated in this blinkered focus on Africa.

Some skepticism over the way the UN seems to ignore non-African human rights abuses is warranted, but much isn’t; the fact is that the UN, like the ICC, just doesn’t have all that much power when it comes to doing things on its own initiative. For the Security Council, for example, to send a human rights case to the ICC would require, at a minimum, that the five veto-holding nations on the UNSC acquiesce to such a move. What comes out looking like a UN bias really comes down to the fact that at least one of those five nations is likely to block any serious human rights investigations outside of Africa for their own geopolitical reasons — Russia won’t let the ICC touch Bashar al-Assad, for example, and the US would certainly veto any proposal to investigate, say, Saudi human rights abuses.

So the UN does what it can, but most of its human rights work continues to target abuses in Africa, like its recent investigation into rights abuses in Eritrea, which has apparently put its investigators at enough personal risk that they’re now under police protection. And I don’t want to make it sound like the UN is wrong for pursuing these cases; if there are human rights abuses in Eritrea or anywhere else in Africa, they should be pursued. It would be morally absurd to throw up your hands about Eritrea simply because the UN hasn’t investigated (or hasn’t been allowed to investigate) the Assad regime’s crimes against humanity.

However, given that some folks in Africa are already skeptical of the UN’s motives on this particular subject, how much harder is it going to be for the UN to have any credibility when its own peacekeepers are being accused of human rights abuses in the Central African Republic?

The UN peacekeeping contingent serving in the Central African Republic are accused of sexually abusing street children in Bangui, a UN spokesman has said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said the latest incident was the third case of alleged child sexual abuse involving peacekeepers in the CAR to have surfaced in recent months.

“If the allegations are substantiated, this would constitute a grave violation of UN principles and of the code of conduct of peacekeepers,” Dujarric said on Tuesday.

This situation has apparently led to an internal fight at the UN, where the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jordanian Prince Zeid b. Raʿad, is looking to fire one of his office’s most senior officials, a man named Anders Kompass, on the grounds that Kompass leaked information to the French government about a sexual abuse allegation involving French troops. Kompass maintains he leaked the information to the French government because he saw that as the best way to stop the abuse and see the perpetrators punished, but Prince Zeid argues that Kompass was working against the UN investigators on behalf of Paris. What evidence has been released so far seems to back Kompass’s version of events (specifically, that he was upfront in telling his superiors at the UN that he’d notified French officials of the allegations), and both Zeid and Kompass have good reputations in the human rights community. But it’s pretty unbecoming that the UN is spending so much time on Kompass’s leak, whatever its motivations, than it appears to be spending on, I don’t know, cleaning up its peacekeeping operation in the CAR.

Also interesting, and kind of hilarious, is that the Obama administration has been very keen on insisting that Kompass be offered full whistle-blower protections from the UN. The irony of this administration dictating whistle-blower policy to another institution is off the charts, but I suppose it’s not unexpected.

The question becomes: why should any nation, African or otherwise, trust the UN to handle human rights violations when its own peacekeepers can’t even be trusted not to commit them? Moreover, why should any country, anywhere, agree to allow UN peacekeepers in when there’s a chance they’ll engage in these kinds of acts? The UN needs to be much better than this.