11 February 2016
The UN Human Right and Wrong Council
Wrong and right in a single week.
by Neil Tidmarsh
The two reports published by the UN Human Rights Council this week suggest that it is an even stranger beast than previously thought. But then the UN itself is in many ways a rather odd beast. Is it the embodiment of all that is compromised, ineffectual, contradictory, prejudiced and ridiculous in humanity? One of the reports would suggest so. Or is it indeed the embodiment of all that is fine and noble in us – our conscience, our greatest hope for peace and justice on earth? The other report gives this view equally credible support.
Last Friday, a panel of five academics, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council as a working group on arbitrary detention, ruled that the human rights of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have been infringed because he is being “arbitrarily detained” in the UK.
Is anyone taking this UN report seriously? The objections to this absurd ruling rang out so loud and clear that they’re hardly worth repeating. Britain hasn’t detained Assange, even though Sweden has issued a European warrant for his arrest to face sex-crime charges in Sweden. Britain can’t detain him because he is in the Ecuadorian embassy. He isn’t being detained in the embassy but is a voluntary guest there, having gone there of his own free will.
Interesting criticisms of the UN working group came hot on the heels of those objections. One of the five academics seems to be an evangelist for dope-smoking. One of them is Australian, so by UN rules should be barred from considering the case of a fellow Australian. Another, the most long-serving member of the group, believes that Assange is not being detained, arbitrarily or otherwise.
The report also reignited the controversy of the appointment of a Saudi Arabian, ambassador Faisal bin Hassan Trad, as chairman of one of the UN Human Rights Council’s teams, just after that country’s regime condemned a number of its critics to death; a controversy which the recent execution of a group of those critics (including the Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr) can only deepen.
And yet, only a few days later, the UN Human Rights Council published a report of an entirely different calibre. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Deaths in Detention” details the findings of a UN investigation into the detention, abuse, torture and killings of prisoners in Syria from just before the uprising in March 2011 to the end of November 2015. It criticises all sides but finds the Assad regime guilty of the majority of abuses. It uses the word “extermination” when describing the regime’s actions against its own people. It claims that the detention, torture and murder of prisoners is a deliberate policy, undertaken systematically and on a vast scale, and sanctioned at the highest levels.
“Prison officials, their superiors throughout the hierarchy, high-ranking officials in military hospitals and the military police corps, as well as government, were aware that deaths on a massive scale were occurring,” said the chairman, Paul Pinheiro. “We concluded there were ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that the conduct described amounts to extermination as a crime against humanity”.
The report could lead to sanctions against the Assad regime and to war crimes charges against its senior figures.
It is not only powerful but timely. Where Syria is concerned, the international community has cautiously avoided talks of sanctions and war crimes (and indeed any pointing of accusatory fingers) out of a reasonable and sensible fear that they might compromise or upset talks and preparations for a peace process. But the peace process has stalled, because opposition leaders claim that the regime and its allies are not complying with UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which demands a ceasefire, an end to sieges of civilian areas to allow humanitarian aid through, and the release of prisoners.
Other UN Security Council Resolutions defining the peace process demand that attacks on civilian targets cease immediately; another report published this week, by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said that 1382 civilians were killed in Syria last month, 679 of them by Russian airstrikes and 516 (including 83 children) by regime forces. Isis killed 101 civilians, the opposition 42, and Kurdish forces 3. Russia signed up to the UN Security Council Resolutions and even now insists that it is a sponsor of the peace process in Syria but its bombings have escalated in recent days, and it has been openly condemned this week by the US secretary of state John Kerry, the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the British foreign secretary Philip Hammond, who has categorically accused it of deliberately targeting civilians.
Now that such reports seem to uphold the opposition’s claims that the regime and its allies are displaying a total lack of good faith towards the peace process – and indeed that Assad cannot be negotiated with – perhaps it is time to consider alternatives to that process. Perhaps it is time to talk about sanctions and war crimes and to point accusatory fingers at last. The UN Human Rights Council Report “Out of Sight, Out of Mind; Deaths in Detention” has started that process; Assad and his allies could soon find themselves in complete isolation and on the receiving end of the international community’s righteous anger.
If that prospect worries them as much as it should, then they would be advised to respect the UN Security Council Resolutions they have signed up to and get the peace process back on track.
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