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Summary: In a bid for wider consensus, today's debate on the new Rights Council is put off until next week.
10 March 2006 – In a bid to secure the widest possible consensus for the new United Nations Human Rights Council, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson has postponed from today until early next week a plenary meeting on what Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called an essential element in reforming the world organization. The United States feels that as proposed the Council, which would replace the much-criticized Human Rights Commission, does not go far enough and has called for renegotiation, a move that Mr. Annan last week said had “chagrined” him, warning that the new body could “unravel” in renegotiations. “I believe there is a collective wish to have the strongest possible support for the new Council,” Mr. Eliasson said in a letter sent to all Member States last night. “In search for consensus, I have therefore decided to postpone Friday morning’s meeting.” The current Human Rights Commission is widely seen as ineffectual and open to manipulation by rights violators. Mr. Eliasson reiterated that no Member State had achieved all its objectives in the draft he has proposed, but noted that “very many of you have indicated that you could support the text as it is. This is both welcome and essential to the process of consensus-building,” he added. It was a point Mr. Annan has stressed continually since the text was introduced last month. “The bad must always give in to the good, but the better must not be the enemy of the good,” he said last week. “That is the advice I would want them to bear in mind as they attempt to settle this issue.” As proposed, the Council would have a higher status and greater accountability than the Commission that meets yearly in Geneva. It would be a subsidiary body of the General Assembly, meet year round as opposed to the six-week annual session of the Commission, and its members would be elected by a majority of all 191 UN Members. Mr. Annan, in presenting his proposed reforms a year ago, wanted the election to be by a two-thirds majority, an element endorsed by the United States. But in noting that he had been unable to secure this, he has repeatedly said that the Council, as proposed by Mr. Eliasson after months-long consultations with Member States, could be a basis for more effective human rights protection. Mr. Eliasson has said a major improvement is the requirement that its members, elected individually by the Assembly, would be judged on their human rights records with the proviso that they can be suspended if they themselves commit gross and systematic violations.