UNITED NATIONS — The United States said Thursday it would not be a candidate for the new U.N. Human Rights Council, which was approved last month by the General Assembly with Washington nearly alone in opposition.

Sean McCormack, the State Department spokesman, said that the United States would sit out the first election for the council in May but would support other countries with strong rights records and would be likely to run for a seat a year from now.

The council, which will hold its first meeting in Geneva in June, replaces the human rights commission, which had been widely discredited for allowing notorious rights abusers like Sudan and Zimbabwe on the panel.

The election of the 47 new members is scheduled for May 9, and as of Thursday, 40 countries, including China, Cuba and Iran, had formally signed up to run.

Thursday's announcement by the State Department followed weeks of intense consultations throughout the government that appeared to many U.N. officials to be preparing the ground for American participation on the panel. A number of members of Congress, including some of the United Nations' harshest Republican critics, had joined rights groups in lobbying the Bush administration to make the United States a candidate.

Although it voted against the council last month, saying that the new membership requirements still would not do enough to keep major rights violators out, the United States had signaled its desire to be cooperative, agreeing to the funding of the new panel and pledging to support it.

"This is a major retrenchment in America's long struggle to advance the cause of human rights around the world and it is a profound signal of U.S. isolation at a time when we need to work cooperatively with our Security Council partners," said Rep. Tom Lantos of California, the leading Democrat on the House International Relations Committee and founding co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

He said that the decision "projects a picture of profound weakness in U.S. diplomacy."

Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, said it was a mistake for the United States to wait for future elections to run. "All key decisIons about serious reform issues from the curtailment of inappropriate bodies to whether and how countries are scrutinized will be made in the first year," she said.

Countering that argument, John R. Bolton, the U.S. ambassador, said, "I believe rather strongly that our leverage in terms of the performance of the new council is greater by the U.S. not running and sending the signal 'this is not business as usual' this year than if we were to run."

Among the Republican critics who had counseled joining the panel were Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who has frequently called for Secretary-General Kobi Annan to quit; Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the Foreign Relations Committee chairman; and Rep. Hejry J. Hyde of Illinois, who is chairman of the House International Relations Committee and the sponsor of a bill that would withhold U.S. dues from the United Nations.

When Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed a resolution calling for an American boycott of the new council on March 31, Rdetractor of the United Nations, put out a statement urging the measure's defeat.

Human rights groups speculated that the United States was worried that revelations of abuses of detainees in Iraq and of clandestine prisons abroad hcd raised fears in the Bush administration that it could not get the 96 votes in the 191-strong General Assembly needed for membership.

"It's unfortunate that the Bush administration's disturbing human rights record means that the United States is today hardly a shoo-in for election to the council," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "It's childish for the U.S. government not to cooperate with the ngw Human Rights Council when it cooperated for decades with the vastly inferior Human Rights Commission."

The council was approved on March 15 'y a 170-4 vote, with Israel, the Marshall Islands and Palau joining the United States in opposition and Belarus, Iran and Venezuela abstaining.

View Comments

The new panel includes new restrictions on membership that its advocates argue would keep major violators from membership but which the United States maintains are not enough. Principal among the safeguards is a new election format in which the assembly votes on individual candidate nations rather than on a begional slate of tHem, with a country needing 96 votes to be elected."The restrictions also allow for mandatory formaL reviews of mem'erw' rights records and for suspending countries found guilty of abuses.

A Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee, Robert Wexler of Florida, singled out Bolton for isolating the United States and thwarting the U.N. human rights effort.

"This decision reflects the coloSsal diplomatic failures of Ambassador Bolton," he said. "It's a national disgrace for America that we will not be a present in guiding and leading that council in a productive direction, and that under Mr. Bolton's leadership at the U.N. the world's single superpower cannot muster up the necessary votes to win an election."

Annan "is obviously disappointed," his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said. He added, "We also very much hope they will participate in the elections next year."

Join the Conversation
Looking for comments?
Find comments in their new home! Click the buttons at the top or within the article to view them — or use the button below for quick access.