Our dear Appalachian-Lukacsian-Burnettian comrade (did I forget anything?) known by the initials VM certainly piqued my interest this morning with that business in the comment thread about the State Department and Arizona and the UN. So I looked into it, and yes it's true, but...
The UN used to have a high commission on human rights. That's the one Libya chaired. Thus discredited, the high commission was replaced by a new body called the UN Human Rights Council in 2006. Under its rules, apparently all member nations are required to submit evaluations of their own human rights records. As nearly as I could find out this morning, this is to be done quadrennially, so this seems to be the first one conducted by the US (i.e., the Bush administration wasn't obligated to do one). It's officially called a universal periodic review, or UPR.
The UPR process (more than you need to know, but...) involves a series of public discussions and consultations held over the previous year, arranged by State in conjunction with local nonprofits, churches and universities. Eleven were held. Here's the list.
The result of these meetings is the report itself, a 29-page document that list the US human-rights record on a number of fronts: freedom of speech, assembly and worship; fairness and equality; et cetera. It's broken into six sections, the fifth of which is entitled "A commitment to values in engagement across our borders," which is broken into three sections: national security, immigration and trafficking.
In the immigration section there are five paragraphs. The first is glorious-history boiler plate. The second is about immigration detention. The third describes the so-called 287(g) program, under which the federal government may delegate to states and localities immigration enforcement. Then the fourth graf says in its entirety:
A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.
And that's it. Three sentences that are as objective and straightforward as they could possible be, just describing a situation. There is no appeal to the UN to do anything. There is no assertion that this is a major problem. There isn't even an adjective describing the law as bad. It's the 95th out of 100 numbered paragraphs, and it's actually one of the shorter grafs in the report.
As fate would have it, this morning I was emailed a write-up of the UPR by Barbara Crossette, the excellent former New York Times journalist who covered the UN and diplomacy for many years and now writes syndicated pieces. I don't have a link, since I got it in an email. Maybe you can find it somewhere. In what reads to me like about a 1,300-word piece, she doesn't even mention the fact that the UPR mentions Arizona.
She focuses on what any reasonable news person would focus on reading it, which is the language about gay rights in America, which is clearly the most newsworthy language and something that, if those kind of people want to get mad about something, maybe they should focus on.
Crossette describes what the US's participation in this process actually means:
A periodic review "package" consists of not only the country's own assessment of how it thinks it has met its obligations under various international and national laws and conventions, but also input from nongovernmental organizations or other interested parties, the office of the high commissioner and finally experts from three other countries -- in the case of the United States, those will be Cameroon, France and Japan. The US review will be on the agenda of the Human Rights Council in November. The council has no enforcement powers; it can merely pass resolutions and make statements. But its actions have a large international audience. And this will be the first appearance by the United States in such a review process. The Obama administration joined the Human Rights Council last year, reversing the Bush administration's hostile policy toward it and global human rights monitoring in general as it affected the United States. In preparing its first review, the Obama administration met with human rights activists and community groups around the country.
In other words, the Bush administration shunned this process, and the Obama administration is participating in it. That's a change. If you think that's a bad change, fine. If you think it's a good one, fine. Let's debate that.
But that's not what's going to happen over the next few days, if our Misanthrophic friend and some of the rest of you are right, which you might well be. By next week, half of America might believe that Obama - not some State Department functionary, not even Hillary C., but Obama himself - wants to "force" Arizona's law to undergo review by the UN or something. And we'll be off to the races again.
Having said all this, I still think it was unwise to include a mention of the law in there. But having now read the report, I can't honestly say that if I'd been in the room, reading that brief and anodyne language, I'd have seen any political red flags. I might have, I might not have.
