A Human Rights Council election with no contest is not an election. India should press for real ones

On 13 October the UN General Assembly elected 15 countries to the Human Rights Council, the UN’s highest human rights body. The ballot was a formality. Each regional group had put forward exactly as many candidates as it had seats, so every candidate was certain to win before a single vote was cast. It was the second year in a row that this happened.

“This uncompetitive vote makes a mockery of the word ‘election’,” said Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch. He is right.

Why it matters

The council was set up in 2006 to replace a discredited commission whose members included some of the world’s worst abusers. The cure was supposed to be the vote: candidates must win an absolute majority of the General Assembly in a secret ballot, so that states with poor records could be kept out. A clean slate removes that cure. When there is one candidate for each seat, the Assembly cannot choose; it can only ratify a list drawn up in private by regional groups.

This year’s list was not a list of villains. It included Japan, Germany, Ireland, Brazil and Uruguay, as well as Nepal, Ghana and Ukraine. That is beside the point. A seat on a body that judges other countries’ human rights records should be earned in a contest, and every candidate, good record or bad, should have to make its case.

The fair objection

Diplomats defend clean slates for practical reasons. Contested races are costly and bruising, involve vote-trading across many unrelated issues, and can leave smaller states, which cannot afford a campaign, out altogether. Regional groups argue that they know their own members best and that agreeing on candidates keeps rotation fair.

These are real costs. But the alternative to a costly election is not a free one; it is no election at all. And the states most eager for uncontested seats are often those that would struggle in an open vote.

What India should do

India has served on the council several times and will want to again. It also argues, rightly, for reform of a UN where too much is decided by a few, as this month’s deadlocked straw polls for the next Secretary-General have shown. Consistency suggests it should back a simple rule within the Asia-Pacific group and urge others to follow: at least one more candidate than seats, every time.

India should also commit, when it next stands, to compete in an open race and to publish the pledges on which it seeks election. A country confident of its democratic credentials has nothing to fear from a real vote. The council’s credibility, and that of everyone who sits on it, depends on members being chosen rather than appointed.