United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a host of ministers will be in Europe for the inaugural gathering of the new Human Rights Council and a conference on disarmament in Geneva today.

Much of the initial two-week session of the 47-state body will be devoted to planning future work, but its chairman ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico has set aside time for examining current rights crises around the world.

The latter will be a test of whether the new body is ready to break out of the confrontational and highly politicized atmosphere often pitting developed nations against developing that hampered the commission, diplomats and activists say.

"The new Human Rights Council must be more than the dysfunctional old commission by another name," said Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director at the US-based Human Rights Watch.

"The new members must... find new and more effective ways to help the victims of human rights violations across the globe," she added in a statement.

But the council, intended to spearhead a series of UN reforms, had a difficult birth, with the United States declining to stand for membership because it said that changes to the old commission did not go deep enough.

Unlike the commission, whose 53 members were nominated by regional blocs, those wanting to take part in the council had to win a majority in the UN General Assembly.

Washington backed Annan's initial call for a two-thirds vote, which it said would help keep out abusers who had been able to join forces within the commission to bloc effective action against violations.

But rights activists say that with the storm of international criticism over Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centres, as well as alleged secret prisons, it was far from certain that Washington would have won election.

One of the other key changes is that the rights records of all members will be periodically reviewed. It will be the job of the council to decide how this will be done.
China has warned that there must be no return to the finger-pointing of the past.

(China Daily June 19, 2006)