The Human Rights Council: A New Era in UN Human Rights Work?

Abstract

K ofi Annan did more than any UN Secretary-General before him to stress the close link between human rights and peace and security. In his inaugural address to the newly created Human Rights Council in Geneva on June 19, 2006, he said: ‘‘. . . lack of respect for human rights and dignity is the fundamental reason why the peace of the world today is so precarious, and why prosperity is so unequally shared.’’ With the creation of the Human Rights Council, ‘‘a new era in the human rights work of the United Nations has been proclaimed.’’ The previous year, at the September 2005 World Summit in New York, Annan persuaded all of the world’s leaders to agree that human rights constitute one of the three pillars—along with peace and security and economic and social development—that form the base of all the UN’s work. The summit’s Outcome Document captured the results of the highly ambitious if not wholly successful UN reform agenda that Annan had initiated in his second term. Landmark outcomes from the vantage point of human rights include recognition by all states that the international community has a ‘‘responsibility to protect . . . should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations’’ from genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; that the regular budget resources of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights must be doubled; and that a new Peacebuilding Commission will be created to ‘‘advise on and propose integrated strategies for post-conflict peacebuilding and recovery.’’ Most important, world leaders decided that a new, more authoritative human rights body—a Human Rights Council—should be created to replace the fiftynine-year-old Commission on Human Rights. After intense and at times highly