JEDDAH, 10 May 2006 — Saudi Arabia was elected yesterday to the newly formed United Nations Human Rights Council in voting by the General Assembly in New York. The Kingdom needed an absolute majority of 96 votes from the 191 members to make it onto the council that will be based in Geneva, Switzerland, like its predecessor the UN Human Rights Commission.
Mufleh Al-Qahtani, deputy director of the Saudi National Human Rights Society, said he was pleased by the news.
“We are happy to know that Saudi Arabia has been elected to the council,” he told Arab News in an interview.
Cuba, China, India, Pakistan and the Philippines were among the nations also elected to council yesterday, General Assembly President Jan Eliasson said. Iran and Azerbaijan failed to win membership.
Seats were distributed in the first round of voting for four of five regional groups. Only Eastern Europe still had to be completed, where for the moment three members — Russia, the Czech Republic and Poland — were selected for the region’s six seats. Voting was to continue later yesterday.
Sixty-three countries were competing for the body’s 47 seats — six fewer than the commission had.
The council’s seats are being divided by regions, with eight set to go to Latin America and the Caribbean, 13 to Africa, 13 to Asia, six to Eastern Europe and seven to Western Europe and others, including the United States, Canada and Israel.
New York-based Human Rights Watch had campaigned to keep what they called the worst human rights offenders off of the new council, but many countries that they had singled out were among those winning seats.
Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth said it was inevitable some rights foes would win seats but “the important step is that we have made real progress” over the discredited Human Rights Commission, shut down in March.
“It doesn’t guarantee that the council will be a success, but it is a step in the right direction,” Roth said.
The United States, an outspoken critic of the old Human Rights Commission, voted against creating the council, arguing barriers were still too low to keep rights abusers from winning a seat. It then decided against seeking a seat this year.
