UN approves Michelle Bachelet as its new chief for human rights
Former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet was unanimously approved as the UN’s human rights chief on Friday and was given a taste of the pressure she will face.
Diplomats from the UN’s 193 member states applauded after General Assembly President Miroslav Lajcak gave official approval to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’s nominee for High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Mr Guterres said Ms Bachelet was the first female president of Chile, first head of the gender equality agency known as UN Women, “a survivor of brutality” by Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet, and a physician who understood people’s thirst for health and economic rights.
Ms Bachelet’s father was imprisoned for treason after opposing the western backed coup that ousted elected Marxist president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.
She and her mother were tortured in a secret prison for two weeks before they fled into exile. Her father, Gen Alberto Bachelet, died of cardiac arrest after months of torture.
Ms Bachelet will replace Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a member of the Jordanian royal family whose four-year term ends on August 31.
“Hatred and inequality are on the rise,” Mr Guterres said. “Respect for humanitarian and human rights law is on the decline. Space for civil society is shrinking. Press freedom is under pressure.”
US minister-counsellor Stefaine Amadeo said it was incumbent on Ms Bachelet to avoid what the US called the failure of the UN human rights system.
She spoke of the Human Rights Council’s “consistent failure to address extreme abuses in the western hemisphere, in Venezuela and Cuba in particular”.
She also told of UN failures “to adequately address major human rights crises” in Iran, North Korea and Congo.
Mohammad Hassani Nejad, a counsellor in Iran’s UN Mission, retorted that the biggest challenge for Ms Bachelet “is to make it clear that human rights is not a means in the foreign policy toolbox of policies against who they dislike”.