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The council is also a platform for expert groups working within and outside the United Nations, and for human rights organizations, to share their opinions and concerns.
Experience shows that member states use this international platform for intense lobbying, and further, often to promote a false image in claiming achievements in protecting, promoting and fulfilling human rights within their jurisdictions.
As a prerequisite to contesting a seat on the council, states have to pledge that they will protect and fulfill human rights in their country and promote them internationally, and specify how they will do this. India, as an elected member of the council, has made such a pledge, commonly referred as the “voluntary pledge.”
Thanks to the skills of Indian diplomats, when a vacancy arose on the council for the Asian bloc, India secured the highest number of votes to fill it – not once, but twice. Its role as a champion of democracy helped it secure enough support in the United Nations.
India’s position as a favored state is also boosted by the eagerness of the Western bloc to please India, along with China, for purely business reasons. Yet if one takes the trouble to go through what India has said at these U.N. conferences and compare it with what the country really does, they are as different as fact and fiction. Those who are aware of the realities in India and have observed how India portrays itself in international forums need no elaboration on this point.
Over the years it appears that an overwhelming number of debates on India are Pakistan-centric. With a neighbor like Pakistan – which meddles in India's internal security to justify complete military control in Pakistan – it is natural for India to take on “the neighboring state with ulterior motives,” a euphemism India uses to refer to Pakistan in the United Nations.
Yet the issue is not only Pakistan. There are other human rights issues in India that are not even remotely related to its neighbor, that are ordinary problems of ordinary Indians. It is natural for India not to encourage discussion of these issues at the United Nations, since the truth regarding India's human rights situation is, in fact, appalling.
This is also the reason India has not extended any invitation to U.N. special rapporteurs with thematic mandates to visit the country. On that front, India is no different from its neighbors. The bottom line is that if the country has nothing to hide, it could extend an open invitation to U.N. rapporteurs, which it has failed to do so far.
The classical defense of the Chinese, used recently by Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen against Yash Ghai, former U.N. special rapporteur on Cambodia, is that U.N. experts are “Western” and visit countries only to preach Western norms.
However, Navanethem Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, is of Indian Tamil ethnic origin from South Africa. There are many other experts within the U.N. system that are from underdeveloped or developing states. In fact, out of 47 experts, 34 are from developing or underdeveloped countries with poor human rights records, like India, and none of the 47 experts has a reason to be biased against Indians.
For that matter, human rights are not Western norms. In fact, hundreds of years before the West even thought of “rights,” Asians included them in their state practices. World-renowned philosophers, political scientists and economists like Dr. Amarthya Sen, also an Indian, have acknowledged this fact.
The concept of “Asian values” is a convenient myth advocated by states with poor human rights standards. The original proponents of the Asian value theory are China, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Indonesia.
What is relevant in the context of the upcoming session of the Human Rights Council, however, is the involvement – or lack thereof – of alternative voices in the process. This includes legitimate political groups, human rights organizations and above all, the country's media. So far, neither the political parties nor the media have taken up the issue of India's false image-building exercise at the United Nations.
India easily walks through the U.N. sessions without many hurdles, facing little criticism from within or outside the country, because of the demonstrated failure of civil society to take on the government in international forums.
Civil society should be vigilant for two reasons. First, it bears the responsibility to challenge the government when the government escapes unscathed after narrating lies in international forums. Second, it is the duty of civil society to make use of all opportunities to exert pressure upon the government to benefit the people. On both these fronts, a major portion of civil society in India is as bad as the proponents of the Asian value caucus.
The 13th session of the Human Rights Council is not likely to be any different.
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(Bijo Francis is a human rights lawyer currently working with the Asian Legal Resource Center in Hong Kong. He is responsible for the South Asia desk at the center. Francis has practiced law for more than a decade and holds an advanced master's degree in human rights law.)
