International Impotence

'If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal'

Emma Goldman

Oh, les Nations Unites. How I am flummoxed by your (un)hallowed halls.

A few years ago while in India, I went to Wagah. This is the point on the India/Pakistan border where every evening at sunset since independence, soldiers from both sides have marched at each other in full military regalia, affecting an extremely threatening goose-step (which, admittedly, occasionally tipped across into Ministry of Silly Walks), opened the gates, closed the gates, opened the gates, closed the gates ad nauseam, and then everyone had a party.

A very astute friend I was travelling with turned to me during this palaver and said, ‘it’s everything I’ve ever learned about international relations conveniently portrayed through the medium of dance’.

I didn’t really know what he meant at the time. I’ve just been repeating the line ever since.

Perhaps I understand a little better now? Who knows. But I’ve been working in Geneva for a month now and the Human Rights Council is almost identical to that summer evening in 2007. Minus the dancing. Which is a shame.

The 21^st Session of the Council has been held over the last few weeks. I’ve been very much in an observer role, as my organisation is officially a monitor, which helps to demystify the UN for anyone who needs to access it for justice, lobbying, or throwing eggs at Syria (I was dangerously, dangerously close to this actually occurring: more on this at a later point).

During these sessions, draft resolutions are discussed by interested states, with a view to their being enshrined in INTERNATIONAL LAW (imagine said in X-Factor bloke’s voice). I covered a really great one on how best to protect journalists in conflict zones, as well as how to prevent states from smushing said journalists if they say anything ‘not in the national interest’ (i.e. calling a spade a spade when the government behave like cretins).

The conversation in these sessions was at point fairly informal (the Austrian and German ambassadors at one point started joking about the latest football match won by Germany); and at other points extremely tense, when thinly veiled insults were thrown from ‘my honourable colleague from Russia’ to ‘my learned friend from the United States’. For ‘honourable’ and ‘learned’, read ‘jackass’ and ‘muncus’.

Russia basically wanted to be able to legally harass journalists. The US said that would be ridiculous. China said that objectivity should be part of the resolution. The UK said that this allusion to neutrality would be used as a pre-requisite for protection of journalists – that is, that if a journalist was *gasp* critical about their government and not wholly neutral about something like the senseless slaughter of a thousand innocent ducklings or summat, they would no longer be entitled to protection under this resolution.

Ultimately, the resolution went through, and the objectivity clause was kept out. There is sense and reason in the world! Many times huzzah.

And then. Oh.

Russia happened again.

They put forward a resolution entitled ‘Using Traditional Values to Promote Human Rights’. It was essentially a two-finger salute to countries which have condemned the incarceration of Pussy Riot. No prizes for guessing which countries though this was a great idea. Don’t get me wrong, I am not an interventionist, and I think that Western states jumping on the universalist bandwagon can be extremely damaging; I also believe that there are traditional customs, beliefs and diversities which must be protected at all costs (for example, Pon Farr. Or is that Vulcan?). But I don’t care who you are or where you’re from: killing a journalist because they say something bad about your government is wrong.

And read in conjunction with Russia’s reservations about the resolution on journalists (‘in Soviet Russia, freedom expresses YOU’), this is kind of what they want to be able to do. Cutting a child’s clitoris out with a blunt piece of glass is NOT OK. Neither are a whole host of other things that might be included in the guise of ‘traditional values’, from child marriage to the killing of gay people, which, insofar as one can belief in objective right and wrong, are objectively wrong.

Anyhoo, this notwithstanding, Russia’s resolution was passed. There is very clear bloc voting going on in the Council, and Latin America, Asia and Africa pretty much thought this was a great idea, outweighing the nay-sayers by around 30 votes.

It’s a good thing the UN can’t enforce a bean’s worth of this resolution.

This does mean, however, that it can’t enforce the protection of journalists either.

The problem is that the traditional values resolution represents a much larger step than the journalists’ resolution. It’s just that (in my opinion) it’s very much a step in the wrong direction. The latter shows rhetorical consensus on the need for the protection of media freedoms, when in reality, it’s much easier for states to keep doing exactly what they’re doing, and given that resolutions aren’t even legally binding, there’s really little incentive for them to change. 

The former, on the other hand, presents really quite a lot of incentive for states to force further repression on whichever groups they see fit, and sadly, this might well be what happens as a result of the vote. They can hardly be prosecuted for contravening a law that doesn’t exist when prosecution for laws that do exist is so utterly flimsy in the first place.

I left the Council that day feeling simultaneously thrilled and devastated that the UN represents little more than a dance between a bunch of really stubborn, wordy, sarcastic peacocks.

Ah, merde.