Three cases of human rights abuses reared their ugly head again this week. The United Nations' role has been called into question, including the responses of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to the criticisms.
The first human rights case involves Myanmar. The Free Rohingya Coalition criticized Secretary General Guterres and former UN Resident Coordinator in Myanmar Renata Lok-Dessallien for failing to safeguard thousands of Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority, in Myanmar. The group cited the findings in a 36-page official report entitled “A brief and independent inquiry into the involvement of the United Nations in Myanmar from 2010 to 2018,” prepared by former Guatemalan Foreign Minister and UN diplomat Gert Rosenthal, which chronicled what the report described as the UN’s "systemic failures." The report, published last Monday, found that the UN system overall had been “relatively impotent to effectively work with the authorities of Myanmar, to reverse the negative trends in the areas of human rights, and consolidate the positive trends in other areas.”
Rohingya
The Secretary General said he was accepting the recommendations “and is committed to implementing them so as to improve the performance of the United Nations system. This review is valuable for the Resident Coordinator and the UN Country Team in Myanmar, as well as in other countries where the UN operates in similarly challenging conditions.” He said that he intended to follow up on the implementation of the recommendations, but he did not accept accountability for his own part in the UN's "systemic failures." In fact, he spun the report's recommendations as being in line with his own efforts to improve performance and accountability of the UN at the country level and to emphasize prevention.
The Rohingya advocacy group for its part accused the Secretary General of failing to hold Ms. Dessallien accountable for reportedly suppressing “an internal report of the alarming failings of the UN in Myanmar” to address “the egregious rights violations amounting to crimes against humanity, specifically against the persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority.” Instead, the group charged, the Secretary General rewarded Ms. Dessallien with a higher position as the chief UN official in India.
The Rohingya advocacy group added in its statement “that in order for impunity to end within Myanmar and within the international protection system, Secretary General and his managerial deputies should be held accountable for the failures that have thus far emboldened Myanmar’s ongoing genocidal persecution of Rohingya ethnic minority in Rakhine State.” The group is demanding that the Secretary General resign.
Murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi
The second human rights case involves the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October within the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A report prepared by the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnes Callamard, was issued on Wednesday. Her report placed responsibility for the “extrajudicial killing” at the highest levels of the Saudi government. Ms. Callamard recommended that Secretary General Guterres "initiate a follow‑up criminal investigation into the killing of Mr. [Jamal] Khashoggi to build up strong files on each of the alleged perpetrators and identify mechanisms for formal accountability, such as an ad hoc or a hybrid tribunal. The Secretary‑General himself should be able to establish an international follow‑up criminal investigation without any trigger by a State.”
The Secretary General’s position, according to his spokesperson, is that while there needs to be “a full and transparent investigation” into the murder, he is powerless to launch any criminal investigation on his own. “If a full and effective criminal investigation is not conducted by Member States, the only way to effectively pursue an investigation, requiring the cooperation of relevant Member States, would be through a resolution of the Security Council, under the appropriate Charter provisions,” said the spokesperson. That may be true, at least with respect to a criminal investigation, although Ms. Callamard viewed the Secretary General’s authority in broader terms.
In any case, there is nothing preventing the Secretary General from being more proactive than he has been to date. He could establish a UN sponsored independent fact-finding commission or panel of experts to follow up on the evidence Ms. Callamard has already gathered and make a recommendation to the Security Council for further action including the establishment of a special international criminal tribunal. Article 99 of the UN Charter specifically permits the Secretary General to “bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.”
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Uyghurs In China
As Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights barrister, wrote in his column appearing in the Guardian last October, “this was an international crime that took place in breach of United Nations conventions in the precincts of a consulate enjoying inviolability under international law. It was an action by a UN member state that threatens peace and security and it should be taken up by the UN security council, which has acted before to set up tribunals to deal with similar atrocities.”
To date, Mr. Guterres has not taken any proactive steps to seek action by the Security Council. His spokesperson laid out the Secretary General’s preference to sit back. “The Security Council, I think, is the master of its domain, and Council members will make up their minds,” he said.
The third human rights case involves a recent visit by Vladimir Voronkov, the UN Undersecretary General for Counterterrorism, to China’s Xinjiang region where it is estimated that at least 1 million Uyghurs are being detained by Chinese authorities. China claims that it has acted in response to an ongoing terrorist threat and that the camps in Xinjiang are “vocational training centers.” The fact that the UN’s counterterrorism chief, not its human rights chief, has been the first high level UN official invited by China to visit the troubled region has drawn criticism from human rights activists and some diplomats. To them, it appears that the UN is being used to provide China with the veneer of legitimacy for its actions that have had serious human rights consequences.
UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy
“The UN allowing its counterterrorism chief to go to Xinjiang risks confirming China’s false narrative that this is a counterterrorism issue, not a question of massive human rights abuses,” Louis Charbonneau, the UN director for Human Rights Watch, said.
“China will, and is, actively saying that what they’re doing in Xinjiang is good terrorism prevention,” said a U.N. Security Council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, whom was quoted by Reuters. “The visit by Voronkov validates their narrative that this is a counterterrorism issue, when we would see it more as a human rights issue.”
At the conclusion of his visit, Mr. Voronkov issued a statement saying that he had been “briefed on the implementation of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy.” Evidently, the human rights issue was ignored. China’s foreign ministry put its own spin on Mr. Voronkov’s visit, stating that China and the United Nations representatives “had a deep exchange of views on the international counter-terrorism situation and counter-terrorism cooperation between China and the United Nations, and reached a broad consensus.”
Secretary General Guterres has unfortunately ducked some critical questions
To his credit, Secretary General Guterres raised with Chinese authorities, during his own visit to China last April, concerns over the treatment of the Uyghurs in detention camps. However, he subsequently allowed the first high level UN official visit to Xinjiang to focus on counterterrorism to the exclusion of human rights. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan had called Secretary General Guterres in advance of Mr. Voronkov’s visit “to convey deep concerns.” Nevertheless, the Secretary General did not reconsider.The visit went forward. When asked whether Mr. Voronkov had the backing of the Secretary General, the Secretary General’s spokesperson replied that he “is part of the Secretary General's team,” but otherwise had no comment on what came out of the visit or whether the visit was appropriate in the first place.
Secretary General Guterres has unfortunately ducked some critical questions raised about the UN's role, including his own, in all three of these human rights cases. Whether he does not want to rock the boat or to ruffle the feathers of influential member states such as Saudi Arabia and China is not clear. What is clear is the prospect of further damage to the UN's already shaky credibility.
Three cases of human rights abuses reared their ugly head again this week. The United Nations' role has been called into question, including the responses of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to the criticisms.
The first human rights case involves Myanmar. The Free Rohingya Coalition criticized Secretary General Guterres and former UN Resident Coordinator in Myanmar Renata Lok-Dessallien for failing to safeguard thousands of Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority, in Myanmar. The group cited the findings in a 36-page official report entitled “A brief and independent inquiry into the involvement of the United Nations in Myanmar from 2010 to 2018,” prepared by former Guatemalan Foreign Minister and UN diplomat Gert Rosenthal, which chronicled what the report described as the UN’s "systemic failures." The report, published last Monday, found that the UN system overall had been “relatively impotent to effectively work with the authorities of Myanmar, to reverse the negative trends in the areas of human rights, and consolidate the positive trends in other areas.”
