Human Rights and Wrongs
April 5, 2004; Page A18

There's a lot of competition for the title, but the low point in the history of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights may have come last year, when Libya was elected to chair the world body. And so we had the spectacle of one of the world's worst human-rights violators holding forth as the U.N.'s leading voice on human-rights violations. Such is the moral authority of the U.N.

This year Libya is gone but things aren't much better. As Freedom House points out in a report released Friday, five of the world's most repressive regimes sit on the 53-member Commission. They are China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. All are ranked "Repressive" in Freedom House's annual survey of political rights and civil liberties world-wide.

The Commission also hosts eight countries Freedom House ranks as "Not Free" -- Bhutan, Egypt, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, Swaziland, Togo and Zimbabwe. Together the two groups constitute one-quarter of the Commission's membership -- a bloc that is not without influence on its proceedings.

Take the issue that is now consuming much of the Commission's time at its annual meeting in Geneva. As our Mary O'Grady pointed out Friday on the opposite page, the Commission is locked in debate over Cuba's crackdown on dissidents in the past year. None of the human-rights violators named by Freedom House has an interest in probing Cuba's crimes lest the world then turn its spotlight on its own violations.

The Rights Commission was founded in the aftermath of World War II, a time of greater moral clarity than today. It's a sad twist of history that the body whose task is to monitor and condemn human-rights abuses now welcomes to its table some of the world's greatest offenders.