Louise Arbour, the international jurist, recently decided against a second four-year term as the UN’s high commissioner for human rights.

In that Arbour is Canada’s highest-ranking civil servant on the world stage, the loss is ours. But it also diminishes the UN and it will undoubtedly prove a blow to the world’s community of democrats who were encouraged in their fight against repressive societies by the support of this high-profile battler for human rights.

Indeed, the diminutive but courageous ex-prosecutor of mass murderers in Rwanda and war criminals in the Balkans is almost uniquely qualified for this post. The question is, what brought her down in the midst of her stride?

For her part, Arbour, 61, says she just wants to return home to Canada and to family. But clearly, she had reached a point over what she was going to put up with in the way of criticism and obstruction.

When Ireland’s Mary Robinson left the high commissioner post in 2002, she said the U.S. - meaning the Bush administration - had prevented her doing her job.

Louise Arbour will not say that. She was not brought down by the opposition of any one country. But she was clearly worn down by the UN’s general culture of protecting national sovereignty at all costs. It is a theme repressive regimes cling to in order to put off scrutiny of their dealings at home, but it is also favoured by the great powers when it suits them and when they do not want their hands tied.

As high commissioner, Arbour had rebuked the Bush administration over its so-called war on terror, arguing that this had "inflicted a very serious setback for the international human rights agenda." She called for an absolute international ban on the transfer of prisoners who could be tortured. And she brooked no nonsense from White House spin doctors who classified water-boarding as "enhanced" interrogation: Arbour came to her office with a professional penchant for the truth and called the practice torture.

The sour remarks from official Washington this week when Arbour announced she was stepping down were depressing in their pointed lack of regret at her leaving. They stressed instead the competitive view that she should have kept her focus on rights-denying totalitarian regimes instead of coming out against a democracy fighting terrorists.

Speaking truth to power is the hallmark of a vibrant democracy, as is strenuous debate. If there is one international post in which candour ought to be a prerequisite, it is the UN’s high commissioner for human rights.

As a moral leader with no armies, nor even much of a budget, all this person can do is deploy his or her voice in the fight against repression, wherever it is found.

In Canada, the only time Arbour was criticized strongly was when she spoke out against what she called the excessive force used by Israel against Lebanese civilians and infrastructure in the war with Hezbollah in July 2006.

Louise Arbour is not ignorant of the irresponsibility of the Hezbollah rocket attacks on civilian settlements in northern Israel. And she knows that in Israel’s family-centred democracy, one death is too many. But she judged the response of the Ehud Olmert government to have been disproportionate, a charge which stung some at the time but which has been subsequently confirmed by independent commissions in Israel itself.

In any fray involving Israel, emotions can run high. But was it necessary to accuse her of bias and anti-Semitism, as several commentators did in the National Post, calling for her resignation?

Arbour herself accepted "criticisms that have a certain validity to them." But she set out her limits that allegations of "bias, hypocrisy, and dereliction of duty were outside the acceptable range" of debate.

In her turn on the world stage - she started in the mid-1990s as an international war crimes prosecutor - she had plenty of other adversaries: Sudan, for example. Arbour had urged the International Criminal Court to prosecute war crimes in Darfur. Or Sri Lanka, which she blasted last October for "the prevalence of impunity" in the suppression of the Tamil minority. For her pains, there would be the typical op-ed article in a pro-government daily, like this one that sums up nicely the high commissioner’s dilemma: "Those U.N. knights in shining armour tilting at windmills in small countries should be told that the protection of human rights is next to impossible during a fiercely-fought war."

Those were no doubt welcome words to several delegations in Geneva, including China, Libya and Cuba, who have been trying to sabotage civil liberties around the world. At the Human Rights Council, they have systematically blocked critical scrutiny of any behaviour but Israel’s. Additionally, they were increasingly trying to control the high commissioner’s own office, its staffing and its agenda.

If there was one tipping point, an attack that Arbour judged intolerable, the perversion of the UN’s Human Rights Council was probably it.

Her biggest disappointment has been that it is so hard to get countries to prosecute violators of human rights in their midst. As a prosecutor, she wants bad guys held accountable.

She expressed disappointment, for example, when accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic died in a Hague Tribunal cell in 2006 because he escaped the verdict of justice. The role of the Human Rights Council was to see that justice triumphs, but it had been corrupted by non-democracies fearful of the light.

Because she was also under fire from Washington, Arbour was getting it from both sides. It would have been so much more effective if the U.S. had respectfully disagreed with Arbour on its issues but had supported her vigorously with respect to her mandate. Instead, they opposed her almost ideologically.

Is there anything to the accusation that she practised double standards? Was she indeed more prone to letting Arabs, Iranians, the Russians and the Chinese off the hook while slamming the U.S. and Israel?

She says she preferred a private approach with Russia and China. She played for results on the ground, using the techniques she thought were the best in each circumstance. In that, she has a backer in George Clooney, the actor and messenger of peace for the UN. In his pursuit of more effective peacekeeping, Clooney, according to the New York Times, "freely admits that he did not hector the Chinese in his meetings" with them on Darfur. "They’re a superpower," he said. "When you get into a room with these guys, you have to find a way for it to be their idea."

Arbour says something very similar: "Naming and shaming is a loser’s game."

Yet she did not hesitate to name the U.S. and Israel when dealing with human rights controversies. Of course, with hundreds of prominent U.S. activists and scholars already deploring the impact of the war on terror on civil liberties, how could she, in conscience, stay mute?

That may have been a wrong call politically. And it may be that Louise Arbour did not have a sufficiently acute political ear to play the UN game, or coddle self-absorbed great powers.

Though she could no doubt see that the new UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is all political ears. He is a man who was favoured by the big players because he will avoid making political waves.

So, a good woman steps down. Not a great day for the UN or for human rights. She will be missed.

(by jeremy kinsman, CBC News, March 11, 2008)

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