Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s unanimous approval as the next UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Friday sparked a sharp exchange between the US and several key opponents over rights abuses — a foretaste of some of the issues Bachelet will confront.
With a bang of his gavel, UN General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak gave official approval by acclamation to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ selection of Bachelet.
Diplomats from the UN’s 193 member states burst into applause.
“Deeply humbled and honored to announce my acceptance as the @UN’s new High Commissioner for Human Rights. I thank Secretary General @antonioguterres and the General Assembly for entrusting me this important task,” Bachelet said on Twitter after the assembly’s approval.
Guterres then touted Bachelet’s qualifications: The first female president of Chile, first head of the gender equality agency known as UN Women, “a survivor of brutality” by a Chilean dictator and a physician who understands people’s thirst for health and economic and social rights.
She has also “lived under the darkness of dictatorship,” he said.
Bachelet’s father was imprisoned for treason for opposing a coup that ousted Marxist former Chilean president Salvador Allende in September 1973.
She and her mother were tortured in a secret prison for two weeks before they fled into exile.
Her father, Chilean Air Force brigadier general Alberto Bachelet, died of cardiac arrest following months of torture.
Guterres told reporters that Michelle Bachelet would take office “at a time of grave consequence for human rights.”
“Hatred and inequality are on the rise,” he said. “Respect for international humanitarian and human rights law is on the decline. Space for civil society is shrinking. Press freedoms are under pressure.”
However, some of the pressures that Michelle Bachelet will face were immediately evident in several speeches following her approval by the General Assembly.
US Minister-Counselor Stefanie Amadeo, speaking on behalf of the UN’s host country, said “it is incumbent” on Michelle Bachelet to avoid what the US called the failure of the UN’s human rights system.
She singled out the UN Human Rights Council’s “consistent failure to address extreme human rights abuses in the Western hemisphere, in Venezuela and Cuba in particular.”
She also cited failures “to adequately address major human rights crises” in Iran, North Korea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Mohammad Hassani Nejad, a counselor in Iran’s UN mission, said that the biggest challenge for Michelle Bachelet “is to make it clear that human rights is not a means in the foreign policy toolbox of policies against who they dislike.”
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights should speak out “for all victims,” he said, citing “migrant kids in cages, or the US-made bombs that kill kids on a daily basis.”
Cuban Deputy Ambassador to the UN Ana Silvia Rodriguez echoed Nejad in speaking out against the polarization and politicization of human rights.
She said the US has “flagrantly” violated human rights by imposing an economic and financial embargo on Cuba for decades, separating migrant parents and children and causing civilian deaths “by bombs and drone wars,” as well as by “brutality and police abuse, particularly against the African-American population.”
Venezuelan Ambassador to the UN Samuel Moncada said his country would only believe the US supports human rights when it stops separating Latin American children and parents, stops using drones and “claiming the use of torture as legitimate practice,” ends discrimination against the people of Puerto Rico and “stops insulting entire nations.”
Moncada called US threats to use military force against Venezuela “the expression of the most racist and cruel government in the recent history of this country.”
“They have no moral right to talk about this topic [human rights], because this hatred has led them to be a threat to international peace and security,” he said.
Amadeo then said that the US “notes with disappointment the incorrect misconstructions, fabrications and false criticism of the delegations of Cuba and Venezuela.”
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