Castro wins an 'election'

Washington Post: Last year reformers at the United Nations set themselves ambitious targets, hoping to open negotiations on expanding the Security Council and rethinking the principles under which the United Nations could sanction military intervention. One of the results of that reform effort is the Human Rights Council, which replaces a toothless and discredited predecessor. The council was launched without the support of the Bush administration, which reasonably worried that it would be little better than the one before. Now those worries have been partially justified. But the administration, to its credit, is trying to salvage something worthwhile from the reform.
The wrangling over the council's design centered on the process for choosing members. Under the old system, countries were selected by regional blocs, a system that allowed serial human rights violators to emerge as panel members. The new system requires candidates to win votes from at least 96 U.N. member states and to outpoll competitors. This higher bar deterred some notorious dictatorships -- Sudan, Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria -- from seeking membership. Others sought membership but lost: Iran, Venezuela. But, as skeptics predicted, the new selection rules weren't tough enough to keep Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia off the council.
Pulling their punches
The question is whether these authoritarians will prevent the council from doing anything worthwhile. The new body is supposed to conduct peer reviews of the human rights records of U.N. members, starting with the countries elected to the new panel. Optimists say these will be meaningful: Even though a handful of abusers got selected to the council, the majority of the members are democracies, and these are said to have an interest in an honest peer-review process. But it's easy to imagine peer-reviewers pulling their punches and allowing the process to degenerate into mush, particularly since panel members have commercial incentives not to alienate powerful countries such as China.
Having voted against the council's creation, the Bush administration has declined to seek membership in the first round of elections. But it has rightly resisted the temptation to snub the United Nations by setting up some rival human rights council outside the U.N. purview.