When the 192-member UN General Assembly meets in mid-May to elect 14 new members to the 47-nation Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), the US will be conspicuous by its absence and missing from the ballot. Justifying its decision, Washington says it will skip the elections because the HRC has lost its “credibility” for focusing primarily on one country — Israel — and ignoring “human rights abusers” such as Myanmar, Iran, Zimbabwe and North Korea.

But UN diplomats, human rights activists and legal experts point out that the Bush administration has no legitimate right to sit in judgment over the transgressions of others while its own “abusive behaviour” is not under scrutiny by any international body. “The US does not have a shred of moral authority left; its only authority is the big stick,” Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, said. He argued that the US claim of staying away from the elections because the Council has lost its credibility is “bogus”.

“It is the US that has lost its credibility, and that is why it would never be elected. Ask almost anyone in the world whether the US engages in torture — sadly the answer will be affirmative,” he added.

When the US ran for a seat in May 2001, it was ousted from the former 53-member UN Human Rights Commission for the first time since its creation in 1947. The Commission was replaced by a Council last year. But Washington also bypassed the first election, possibly fearing defeat. This is the second consecutive year it has avoided elections to the UN’s supreme human rights body.

An Asian diplomat said that the resentment against Washington was so intense at that time that many of the member states, including US allies, who publicly pledged their votes reneged on their promises privately — and got away with it in a secret ballot voting. The US refusal to stand for elections has triggered sharp criticism from at least one US Congressman — Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California — who described the decision as “an act of unparalleled defeatism”. Lantos went one step further by accusing the Bush administration of surrendering the HRC to “a cabal of military juntas, single-party states and tin-pot dictators” who will retain “their death grip on the world’s human rights machinery.”

The US State Department said last month that the HRC is not a “credible body” because it refused to pass strictures on some of the world’s major “human rights abusers”, including Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Iran and North Korea. Stephen Zunes, professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, says the US is certainly not the only country which has engaged in violations of international humanitarian law to an extent that raises questions regarding the appropriateness of sitting on the UN’s Human Rights Council.

Indeed, there are quite a few countries that are even worse, he noted, particularly regarding the treatment of their own citizens. “Still, there is perhaps no other country that is so self-righteous about lecturing governments it doesn’t like about their human rights abuses while simultaneously defending its own human rights abuses of foreign nationals as well as providing large-scale security assistance to allied regimes which engage in even more egregious human rights abuses,” Zunes said. — IPS