The Washington Post notes that the one "reform" undertaken by the miserable failure known as Kofi Annan has itself become a miserable failure.
A MAJOR piece of the United Nations reform promised by Secretary General Kofi Annan was a new Human Rights Council. The idea was to replace the Commission on Human Rights, which had been hijacked by rogue states such as Libya and Sudan, with a body that could refocus attention on serious human rights violations around the world -- and in so doing remove what Mr. Annan said was "the shadow" cast by the old organization on "the United Nations system as a whole."And what is the recommendation of The Post, not exactly a far-right, "neocon" hotbed?When the Human Rights Council was approved by the General Assembly in March, we were among the skeptics who doubted that it would be much of a change, mainly because the membership rules still allowed for the election of human rights violators. As it turned out, we were wrong: The council, which completed its second formal session last week in Geneva, has turned out to be far worse than its predecessor -- not just a "shadow" but a travesty that the United Nations can ill afford.
If there is no turnaround, the council's performance ought to invite consideration of the measure that was applied to the U.N. cultural organization, UNESCO, when it ran amok in the 1980s: a cutoff of U.S. funding.




