GENEVA, Switzerland, Nov. 30 (UPI) -- The newly revamped Human Rights Council apparently took to heart fresh criticism by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, who both said it was too narrowly focused on the Middle East.
The panel of 47, which earlier this year replaced the disgraced 53-member Commission on Human Rights, announced Thursday it was looking into abuses in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region.
Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, president of the Geneva-based panel, said a special session devoted to the human rights situation in Darfur would be held immediately after the current session ends next week, probably around Dec. 12.
The meeting was requested by 29 members of the council. Only one-third of the members are needed to request a special session.
Only Wednesday Annan urged them to embrace the universality of rights, seeing as previous sessions have only been on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It was vital the panel's members "are willing and able to build coalitions based on principle," he said in a statement read out by Arbour. "Do not let yourselves be split along the fault line between North and South ... as your colleagues have done in some other parts of the system, with results inimical to progress."
This was an apparent reference to the G-77, a group of about 132 developing nations, plus China, who effectively scuttled Annan's reform package earlier this year that would have given the secretary-general more power in moving staff around when and where it was most needed.
The G-77 members felt their hands on the U.N. purse strings were the only real control they had in the 192-member General Assembly, since the Security Council handles peace and security and the rights council has its own area of responsibility.
"States that are truly determined to uphold human rights must be prepared to take action even when that means, as it sometimes will, giving offence to other states within their own region," the secretary-general said.
The area most in need of innovation is the organization of the universal periodic review, a peer review mechanism, he said.
"This transformative idea was certainly not intended to impede or discourage the council from bringing massive and gross violations of human rights to the world's attention as and when they occur," Annan said.
"It was intended to give concrete form to our shared principles of universality, non-selectivity, objectivity and cooperation," he continued. "The world looks to the council to develop a review mechanism that lives up to those ideals."
The council has not yet reviewed a single one of its own members.
The secretary-general reminded the council held all three of its special sessions so far on the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"I hope, however, that the council will take care to handle this issue in an impartial way, and not allow it to monopolize attention at the expense of others where there are equally grave or even graver violations," he said. "There are surely other situations, besides the one in the Middle East, which would merit scrutiny by a special session of this council. I would suggest that Darfur is a glaring case in point."
He was backed up by the high commissioner who just returned from the Middle East, visiting Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. However, she also briefed on the situations in Haiti, Iraq, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the western Sudan region of Darfur.
Arbour called on the Khartoum government to "provide convincing answers regarding its well documented links with the (armed Janjaweed) militia, as well as the possible criminal culpability of its officials in aiding or abetting acts committed by the militia on the government's behalf."
She urged the international community to give its full support to the International Criminal Court. The court's chief prosecutor is winding up an investigation into war crimes committed in Darfur since 2003.
Nearly 300,000 are reported to have died as a result of the conflict and another one to two million people displaced. Almost daily horror stories come out of the camps, particularly reports of wood-gathering women being raped by rebels and militia.
Juan Mendez, the secretary-general's special adviser on the prevention of genocide, told the panel: "The prevention of genocide is a legal and moral imperative."
He briefed the rights council on his work, saying the support of member states is crucial in the effort to identify countries or situations of risk and that he was also exploring ways of how he could work more closely with the council to devise workable approaches for ensuring that conditions do not deteriorate so much that genocide might take place.
While the United Nations has not yet made a legal determination of whether genocide has occurred in Darfur, the United States has called the atrocities "genocide."
