http://www.unwatch.org/cms.asp?id=924493&campaign_id=63111#juscanz

GENEVA — Today’s 13th emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council, on Haiti, was a harmful waste of the organization’s precious time, resources, and moral capital.

Haiti is certainly a dire emergency, but the council, which is supposed to address human rights violations, has no budget, authority or expertise on humanitarian aid, and is simply the wrong forum.

According to one UN estimate, a day of conference and translation services can cost up to $200,000. Instead of being used for today’s questionable exercise, that money should have gone to Haiti’s needy victims.

Unlike other UN bodies, the Human Rights Council has neither the power of the purse nor of the sword, only the power to turn a spotlight on the worst abusers.

Tragically, however, the council has refused to hold special sessions to try and stop Iran from massacring student protesters, terrorists from killing civilians in Baghdad and Kabul, or China and Cuba from arresting bloggers, journalists and dissidents. Yet today it convened — to do what, exactly? Condemn the earth for quaking? It’s nonsensical.

Brazil, whose military has commanded the UN forces in Haiti for the past several years, was the one who requested today’s session. The leading power in South America, Brazil is determined to preserve its regional influence, with its rule over Haiti becoming a way to flex its muscles, as well as to gain UN credibility and one day win a seat on the Security Council.

The sudden, post-earthquake arrival of US forces and other actors challenges Brazil’s position. Hence today’s meeting, with Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim given an outsized role at the session. (Click here for summary of speeches.)

Also today, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva blamed wealthy nations for Haiti’s poverty and misery, saying he hoped the quake would shame world leaders into doing what they should have done decades ago.

Beyond Brazil’s use of the special session to jockey for international influence, the larger question is why the session won such wide and easy support, when requests for urgent meetings on massive abuses elsewhere are routinely ignored by the council members.

Dominated by repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, the council majority prefers to waste time on an issue that involves no violation or perpetrator. It’s a public relations exercise that diverts attention from examining genuine human rights abuses, and aids member states that want the world to believe the council is nevertheless doing something.

The council was similarly misused last year with an urgent meeting on the financial crisis, and the year before that on the rise in food prices. Because it’s inherently the wrong forum, both meetings amounted to futile political exercises that produced nothing but paper.

The United States and the European Union should not have lent their names as co-sponsors to this equally futile exercise. It only takes the council further away from its stated mission of protecting individual human rights, and sends the wrong message.

Interestingly, the EU and other Western countries had previously demanded that all special sessions include a specific description of the human rights violations at issue (see par. 64 at p. 17 here ). However, many of the same countries who took that position co-sponsored today’s session, despite the absence of any such description or violations.

The UN titled the meeting a “Special Session on Support to Recovery Process in Haiti: A Human Rights approach.”