China, Cuba, Russia elected to UN Human Rights Council
The UN General Assembly voted Tuesday to elect a new tranche of 15 Human Rights Council (HRC) members, including China, Cuba and Russia.
The trio of countries won seats over objections from critics who challenge their rights records.
Reads like an excerpt from The Onion, but unfortunately it is not. What reasons exist that would allow these kinds of countries to join the UNHRC?
If you want to have an organization that includes every country on Earth, you have to have standards that are acceptable to the lowest common denominator nations. Otherwise, they'd "take their ball and go home" and you'd have a multilateral organization that excludes lots of countries as isn't a global parliament including every country on Earth as the UN aspires to be. Absent global federalism (which the UN's founders aspired to, to some extent, but knew that they couldn't get agreement to), that's the reality.
There are regional organizations like the Council of Europe, that have selective membership which permits them to impose more strict standards on their members through binding treaties. Their strategy is to get everyone on board while they support human rights and then to prevent them from sliding off the human rights wagon later on, and to potential impose sanctions collectively on non-member human rights violators. But, this isn't an option for the UN.
There seems to be unfortunately no mechanism to keep this from happening. This is not the first time it has happened: Libya got the chairmanship in the past, under Gaddafi. The problem is that, as farcical as this seems, how could you stop it? It's not even "the UN's fault", it's what member states vote on.
Any formal definition of not-good-for-human-rights would get vetoed by Russia and China.
To paraphrase a comment, once you start excluding countries for "bad behavior" in one domain, it can spread to other domains. For example, while the subject here is Human Rights, it stands to reason that if lack of performance on a subject triggers exclusion, then this mechanism could be used to deny US membership on any UN climate change committee.
Soft power and persuasion decide these types of things, and the West isn't particularly unified right now. Nor is it immune from criticism regarding human rights.
Because the UN is not an alliance of some developed countries. There are many underdeveloped countries, but their voices have long been ignored. People are only concerned about the "freedom criteria" of some of the louder developed countries.
This is why, whenever the US and westerns lead a condemnation coalition with some countries, China can pull another coalition with more countries.
The world at this time is colliding.
In addition to the reasons listed, I think there is one of political convenience. One simply needs channels of communication to interact with these countries on human rights issues. I believe that having them out of the council makes such communication one-sided and inefficient.
A similar situation is, say, with Navalny poisoning sanctions. It would be most logical for Putin to top the list of EU travel banned persons, but obviously this would complicate political communication matters so much that it simply cannot be done.
As many have already answered, the UN wouldn't last long as a global organisation that seeks to improve the world if they imposed strict criteria on the standards each nation should stand by. The UN wouldn't be able to get the world to agree on an embargo of North Korea for example if they were constantly berating China and Russia for their behaviour.
Another argument that can be posed is what human right standards does a nation need to meet to be allowed to be on the Human Rights Council? Can the US be there despite detention of asylum seeking minors in poor conditions and a large incarceration rate of their minority populations? Can France be there despite funnelling large amounts of wealth and weapons to oppressive dictators across West Africa? If only nations that had little to no human rights breaches were allowed than there is only about five nations in the world I can think of that have any chance of being on there.
Well, I would rather ask why suspension and expulsion procedure have not been initiated against those countries. What they are doing these days may lead to final war for the entire humanity, these are the kingdoms promoting injustice as a virtue... This just answers the question, subtly. The other countries in the UN are not ready to block Council membership for those violators due to excessive tolerance. Long story short, excessive tolerance is the key reason.
