The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights will not be represented in September. His mandate ends with the bitter failure of his recent trip to China.
by (with AFP)
Within the United Nations, there is an even more exposed and more frustrating function than that of secretary general, currently occupied by the Portuguese diplomat Antonio Guterres. That of High Commissioner for Human Rights: no holder of the post has ever repaired a second term since the creation of this function in 1993. And the only one to have “extended” her mandate, the South African Pillay did it in September 2012 for only two years, at the express request of the UN General Assembly. The difficulty of this position is due to an equation that even the most prestigious personalities fail to solve. Find a median path between the hammer of Western democratic requirements, less and less convincing on the international scene, and the anvil of authoritarian regimes.
The former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who herself undergone the prison regime and the tortures of the Pinochet diet in her own country, during the 1970s, had been a little quickly presented as the ideal choice for (finally) Show it to dictators. It was counting without the gravitors inherent in the UN system, which are part of them that he is supposed to tance. Clearly: how to denounce the systematic abuse of human rights perpetrated by China, when Beijing has a permanent seat on the Security Council, a right of veto and infiltrates more and more the major UN agencies to pre -empt any criticism of him?
With the sliced positions, Michelle Bachelet preferred “dialogue”. It did not investigate – the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) does not have the mandate stricto Sensu – but “exchanged” with liberticide regimes. Until passivity? This is what the main NGOs criticize him, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, especially in the aftermath of a recent observation trip to China, the first of a human rights commissioner of the UN since 2005. Visit that will especially allow the power of Xi Jinping to save face without great difficulty, since Michelle Bachelet saw nothing, not even in Xinjiang about which the international community is worried about the possible genocide committed to Uighurs by Beijing. Carefully choreographed, out of sight, the movements of the UN delegation accentuated the discomfort around the High Commission for Human Rights. To the point that some have wondered in recent weeks how Michelle Bachelet, whose mandate ends at the end of August, would justify the possible desire to stay in office.
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