World Bulletin
No US Funds for the Human Rights Commissioner
By Barbara Crossette
Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in Geneva. UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre.
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Feb. 17 -- From the beginning of his administration, moves by President Barack Obama to reintegrate the United States in the human rights work of the United Nations have been welcomed worldwide. The US joined the four-year-old Human Rights Council last year for the first time and has sent people experienced in the field to work with it.
So it comes as a surprise to many that there is no money for another important body in the budget that the Obama administration sent to Congress early this month: the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The office of the high commissioner, Navi Pillay, a South African judge known for her work on international criminal tribunals, is separate from the council but actively involved in its work. Direct donations to the high commissioner’s office are voluntary, but the office depends on those funds for more than half its budget.
Why this happened is strictly a matter of financial constraints, the State Department says.
“There are many very worthy activities within the UN system that we would like to support with voluntary contributions,” P.J. Crowley, a State Department spokesman said in an e-mail message. “However, in a tight budget environment, we were not able to add an additional voluntary contribution for this office.” Crowley said that the US “strongly supports the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,” and is aiding it financially, if indirectly, through the money the US is assessed for the regular UN budget, which also supports the Human Rights Council.
Some human rights advocates inside the UN and in nongovernmental organizations who are dismayed by this decision have their own theories on what happened. They say that it is known in Washington that a lingering low priority is still assigned to UN human rights activities among some high-ranking American officials despite the official policy of the administration.
Moreover, at least two influential foreign lobbies in Washington are often critical of the high commissioner’s office and the Human Rights Council. Most prominent among them are pro-Israeli and pro-Indian groups.
Pillay and the Goldstone Report
Pillay welcomed a Human Rights Council report sharply critical of Israeli actions during its attack on Gaza last winter, though she repeatedly pointed out that the report’s independent investigators, led by Justice Richard Goldstone (also from South Africa) had found serious fault with the militant Palestinian group Hamas, which rules Gaza, as well as with the Israelis. Both, the report said, may have committed war crimes.
In addition, the Indian government, through its diplomats in New York and Geneva, where the high commissioner is based, has tried to thwart Pillay’s decision to make caste discrimination, widely practiced in India, a major focus of her office.
But lobbies usually work hardest to influence Congress as the budget is debated, not when it is written as a proposal, and Congress has recently been friendlier to UN human rights bodies. Last year, under the current budget in operation, Congress added funds for the high commissioner’s office when the State Department also did not ask for money.
It now appears that supporters of Pillay’s work hope that will happen again. The State Department spokesman alluded to that possibility, when he pointed to the Congressional decision last year to fill the void -- $8 million for fiscal year 2009 and $7 million for 2010. The sum may not be large, but the signal is.
Ambassador to Human Rights Council Delayed
Congress may be harder to predict this election year. It has been holding up for months the appointment of an ambassador to the Human Rights Council. Reportedly, a battle in the State Department occurred over whether it would be too costly to set up that separate mission, so administration support may be lukewarm. The Senate did finally confirm last week the naming of Betty King, an American diplomat with years of experience within the UN on social issues and human rights, to be US ambassador to all the UN agencies and programs in Geneva. After New York, Geneva has the largest UN presence.
A leading human rights advocate close to the decision-makers, who did not want to be named, said that when the budget proposal for international organizations was written at the State Department, there was evidently no influential official willing to fight for and monitor the fate of the high commissioner’s office. (The US strongly backed the office in its founding in 1993.) It was only when the budget proposal was completed this year did supporters of the high commissioner realize the office had again been cut out – and by an administration publicly committed to work internationally in support of human rights.
Human rights advocates – including most recently those who are pressing the government to ratify the 1979 Convention on All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, known as CEDAW, as well as other international treaties – say they are told in Washington that with so many huge national problems to confront and solve, the administration “will get to it when it gets to it.”
This attitude is understandable to many, given the nation’s economic problems and two wars, but it nonetheless will fuel new criticisms, particularly from the Democratic left already unhappy with other decisions in Washington on issues such as intelligence gathering and the treatment of detainees under investigation for terrorism.
“Good intentions,” an activist said of the administration’s record, “followed by not much.”
Barbara Crossette is the United Nations correspondent for The Nation and a former New York Times UN bureau chief.
Keywords: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, Human Rights Council, P.J. Crowley, CEDAW, Betty King, Goldstone report
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