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U.N. Human Rights Council Gets a New Ceiling – and More Controversy

By Patrick Goodenough

CNS News

November 18, 2008

The United Nations on Tuesday will unveil a multi-million dollar ceiling decoration, paid for in part by the Spanish government’s budget for overseas aid.

The Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero contributed almost $14 million of taxpayers’ money to the project, including nearly $1 million earmarked for African aid. Other funding came from private Spanish donors.

Miquel Barcelo, a world-renowned Spanish abstract artist, has been working with a team of 20 assistants for more than a year on the 15,000-square-foot ceiling of a conference hall in Geneva, which will become the permanent home of the often-controversial Human Rights Council.

Zapatero will join U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, Spain’s King Juan Carlos and 750 guests for the unveiling of the ceiling. Barcelo says it is intended to resemble a grotto, featuring thousands of “stalactites” colored with more than 100 tons of paint with pigments from around the world.

The Spanish government calls it one of the U.N.’s most significant artworks – some are even calling it “the Sistine Chapel for the 21st century” – but at home, debate has erupted over what critics view as inappropriate use of development aid. . .

. . .The council has also been dogged by criticism about a disproportionate focus on Israel, while other situations get scant attention.

The council also includes countries with poor human rights records, including Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Cuba and Pakistan.

Citing procedural weaknesses and abuses in practice, the Bush administration has pointedly not stood for election.

“Instead of meeting for self-congratulatory ceremonies, the council should do its job and stop ignoring human rights violations around the world,” Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based non-governmental organization U.N. Watch, said Tuesday.

Neuer said the council had, in its two years of existence, systematically undermined the cause of human rights.

It had also “eviscerated the U.N.’s few existing tools that work,” he said, citing the council’s gradual elimination of human rights monitoring in Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan’s Darfur.

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