UN Human Rights Council agrees new procedures

Jun 20, 2007, 0:07 GMT

Geneva - The UN Human Rights Council finally voted to accept a hard-fought compromise agreement Tuesday on its future working procedures, several hours after a UN deadline expired.

The final draft, setting up much of the institutional architecture, had been agreed just one minute before time ran out at midnight on Monday and was due to be formally accepted next morning.

However, the wrangling continued well into Tuesday and it fell to the Council's new president, the Romanian ambassador Doru Romulus Costea, just hours into the job, to push for a vote which saw the text accepted by 46 votes to one.

Canada broke ranks to register the single protest vote, unhappy with the decision to abolish the special UN rapporteurs for Cuba and Belarus and opposed to singling out the Palestinian territories for regular special attention.

During the negotiations China had been forced to climb down over calls for a minimum two-thirds majority to sanction investigations into specific countries accused of abuse. EU member states insisted the council stick with a simple majority.

Members did agree, however, on the manner in which every country's human rights record should be scrutinized in turn under a new tool, the Universal Periodic Review.

The United States, which is not a member of the Council, said it was concerned by the elimination of the two country mandates. Ambassador Warren Tichenor in a statement said it raised serious concerns over the Council's ability to 'assess human rights situations in an unbiased fashion.'

Cuba hailed the decision as a 'historic victory in the struggle of our people to validate justice and put an end to the anti-Cuban exercises' of the United States, according to a statement released in Havana.

EU foreign policy head Javier Solana recognized the deal as a compromise which he said 'contains some good elements and some less desirable ones.'

But Hillel Neuer, executive director of the human rights group UN Watch, accused the Council of 'backsliding on key fronts.'

The Council was set up a year ago to take over from the widely discredited Human Rights Commission.