By Stuart Gorin
Washington File Staff Writer

Timonium, Maryland -- There has to be reform of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to keep it from becoming an irrelevant body, says Ellen Sauerbrey, a public member of the U.S. delegation to the commission.

Sauerbrey said it would be tragic if the commission is weakened, "because that is the main arm for the United Nations for trying to bring about positive change in this area. There is nobody else."

Sauerbrey said she found the experience of being part of the delegation "very sobering" as she heard so many accounts of human rights abuses taking place throughout the world.

"It's just not part of our psyche to even recognize that there is the kind of torture, kidnapping, deliberate violence and rape, forced prostitution and trafficking -- the kinds of things that governments are engaged in as a means of controlling their people," Sauerbrey, who lives near Timonium, Maryland, said in a recent interview following her six-week assignment in Geneva.

A former Maryland state legislator and two-time Republican gubernatorial candidate, Sauerbrey was one of five public members selected by President Bush as part of the nation's 25-member delegation to the annual U.N. commission meeting. The United States, she pointed out, was the only country at the meeting that included public as well as governmental members on its official team. The public members received travel and living expenses for their time but no salary.

Viewing concern for human rights as a critical part of U.S. foreign policy, she said the United States is a compassionate nation "that has to care about human rights abuses, whether they be in our country or on foreign soil."

This concern is critical, she said, because "if we are going to be a country that gives foreign aid, it is useless if it is falling in the hands of dictators and tyrants and not getting to the people who need the help.

"If we are just pouring money into countries where there is no hope that anything good is going to come of it because the people are so suppressed and live in fear and have no property rights, and if those kinds of basic rights are not in place, then our sending foreign aid is just perpetuating dictators and tyrants. So to me, it is all related," she said, adding that the United States has to be involved in looking out for civil rights and political rights.

Sauerbrey said she found it a wonderful opportunity and a broadening experience at the Human Rights Commission meeting to have been placed in charge of a resolution on HIV-AIDS, which she called "an absolute disaster happening around the world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, but also breaking out in even larger numbers in Russia and some of the Southeast Asian nations."

She said "If the right human rights policies are not in place in these countries, our being asked to send large amounts of medication is going to be meaningless" since a of lot of it will end up falling into the wrong hands and it will never get to the people who need it.

It was unfortunate, she said, that in the end the United States could not support the HIV-AIDS resolution because it put treatment ahead of prevention, made access to pharmaceuticals an entitlement and limited the right of countries to set priorities within their national health policies. Sauerbrey said that the United States still is strongly committed to an integrated approach addressing AIDS that combines prevention, care and treatment, and effective research and development.

Still, Sauerbrey said, the opportunity to be the action officer on this resolution allowed her to see how the process works and to interact with members of the commission from other countries. She enjoyed participating in the negotiation process, she said.

"I certainly know from being in the legislature that coalition-building and personal relationships are a big part of getting things done," she said. She added, however, that "one of the difficulties in this environment is that you've only got six weeks, you've got 53 countries, you've got to try to figure out who people are in a very short period of time, and that's a challenge."

Sauerbrey also said the process used in the commission was strange to her, because with her legislative experience she was used to first having a document presented.

"The paper precedes the debate, so that when there is a debate, you know precisely what it is you're debating," she said. "In this Human Rights Commission environment, it's kind of an upside-down process from what I was used to because you have a lot of debate that goes on for the first two-and-a-half weeks that is not related to any specific resolution. People are just talking in generalities."

While many of the countries in the 53-member commission are democracies that have good records on human rights, she said it was disconcerting that a number of others have poor human rights records.

"You could constantly see the countries that don't want to be spotlighted themselves banding together to ensure that nobody will spotlight them on the issues of human rights abuses," she said.

Sauerbrey added, however, that large numbers of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were in attendance, and their representatives "painted a very different picture of the human rights abuses in various countries" and were willing to "point fingers and name names."

Expressing criticism of several European allies for declining to co-sponsor with the United States resolutions condemning human rights abuses in such countries as China and Sudan, Sauerbrey said this non-action could make the entire commission "irrelevant."

Asked, however, about what accomplishments the commission session had, she listed the passage of resolutions regarding Cuba, Iran and parts of Southeast Europe. For example, she said, Croatia was happy to be in the situation of saying it had made progress and addressed human rights issues that had been raised in the past. "Croatia, it was agreed, would not be named in the resolution as a problem country," she added.

Noting that benefits are long-range rather than short-range, Sauerbrey said one of the things that made her feel that the commission's work must have some meaningful impact is "the tremendous effort that China and Cuba go to in trying to avoid being spotlighted in the world community as human rights abusers."

She stressed that countries with poor human rights records are introducing or co-sponsoring resolutions in a new category of entitlement and rights in the social and cultural area to divert attention from fundamental issues.

Promising a right to housing to people who lack potable water and adequate food is meaningless, Sauerbrey said. She said these "rights" are simply words on paper, and while they are worthy aspirations, "they are unlikely to be realized in countries where citizens lack basic legal protections, where property rights are not secure, where markets are not open and where corruption is rampant."

As a public member of the U.S. delegation, Sauerbrey was responsible for delivering two speeches before the commission on specific themes.

On the subject of racism, which the United Nations will address at a world conference in South Africa in September, Sauerbrey said the fight against it "is in every nation's interest." Stressing that the United States opposes racism in all of its forms and manifestations, she said, "Our policy is not just rhetorical. We have backed it up with a set of interlocking and very comprehensive laws that specifically target racism and racial discrimination of every kind."

Sauerbrey also spoke on the subject of education, noting that "children are the keys to our future" and "we must remove barriers to achievement and ensure equal access to a quality education for children of every background."

Asked what a "typical day" was like in Geneva, Sauerbrey said delegation meetings would begin at 8 am with discussions on who would have what responsibilities, what information had come overnight from Washington, and what position other countries would be expected to take in reference to specific issues.

That meeting was followed by a meeting of the WEOG (Western European and Others Group) to discuss common interests, she said, and that was followed by a three-hour plenary session. The plenary session could be either to talk about resolutions or actually draft them.

During a two-hour break, she said, the delegation would have a quick lunch, a chance to write notes for reports sent back to Washington, or else attend a forum or roundtable discussion on a range of topics from how technology impacts human rights to abuses of women. "Sometimes there were maybe six different things going on at the same time, and we tried as a delegation to cover them," she said.

Sauerbrey said another three-hour plenary session followed these subject-matter discussions, and as everyone got busier and busier, there often would be additional evening and night plenaries that could last as late as midnight. The next day, she said, the schedule started all over again.

She said she believed the public members brought a "fresh perspective" to the delegation, and now will be instrumental in educating their own spheres of contacts -- many of whom are unaware of aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Being a political leader in Maryland, for example, Sauerbrey said she has an email tree of more than 5,000 people with whom she corresponds.

Her main message, she said, now that ECOSOC has voted the United States off the Human Rights Commission for the next session, is that the United States "really needs to speak out strongly and not be in any way deterred by this as far as our international goals on human rights are concerned."