The UN General Assembly has once again openly mocked some of the major principles it purports to champion. It has elected several of the world's worst human rights violators as full members of its Human Rights Commission. In the process, it employed a questionable procedure in which there was no competition. Member countries of the UNGA were presented with 18 candidate-nations for 18 pending vacancies on the UNHRC. In the event, as usual in such UN processes, none of the candidates failed to gain a majority vote, so the 48-member UNHRC will at least have all its seats filled when it meets in Geneva next year.
The process was questionable, the results uneven, to say the least. Against the principles of the "new" UNHRC established by secretary-general Kofi Annan in 2006, there was no open competition for the UNHRC seats. Diplomats and UN bureaucrats picked the so-called candidates based entirely on a combination of geography and length of service. The first criterion was the location of the countries. Seats were allotted to the Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Africa and two zones of Europe, east and west.
The candidates for the final election then were put on the list according to "last out, first in". The five Asian nations that have had their UNHRC seats for the shortest time were the five put on the election list. They were India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Fiji and Bahrain. The same procedure was used for the other regions.
