A United Front from United States to Iran

Iranian blogger, Farah Karimi, Rooz Online:

The recent UN General Assembly meeting in New York could take a historical step towards human rights in the world. Structural reform in the UN was discussed and many suggestions were brought up by different organizations as well as countries.

From the perspective of human rights, the most considerable proposal was by Kofi Anna, U.N. Secretary General himself and was discussed by participating leaders. Annan suggested creating a "Council of Human Rights" to overview human rights situations in different countries and provide it with sufficient and necessary executive authority to implement its decisions.The importance of this proposal is the fact that the U.N. Human Rights Commission that is dealing with human rights issues now has severe structural weaknesses. The main challenge is that there are no specific criteria for its membership. Therefore, there are countries that sit on the government board that themselves have serious records of human rights violations and therefore are really not credible sources of dealing with human rights issues. Libya is a good example of this. READ MORE

Another structural weakness of the Commission is the fact that there is no guarantee for the implementation of its fruitful decisions even when critical steps need to be taken. As a result, countries continue violating the human rights of their citizens.

By suggesting a "Human Rights Council" Annan means a permanent council with executive power that can implement the necessary reforms so that these countries would not be allowed to be member of the Commission. Such a permanent and powerful Council can effectively pressure the governments that have records of human rights violations.

However, this positive proposal faces barriers from a wide range of countries, ranging from the US to Iran whose violations of human rights stood against the U.N. secretary General. But despite their diplomatic differences, these countries united and opposed Annan's proposal. But Annan’s recommendations should be followed up seriously. Human rights activists most likely will and with the cooperation of international public opinion such united fronts such as that between the US and Iran will hopefully be overcome.