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In recent years the UN Commission on Human Rights has been widely and severely castigated for its failures to live up to the vision of being a genuine protector of victims of human rights abuses and instead becoming a shield for the violators. This article provides an assessment of these criticisms of the Commission by exploring its historical beginnings, its notable achievements, and its manifest shortcomings, and then analyzes how these and other factors came into play when the membership of the United Nations decided to replace the Commission with the new Human Rights Council. * Paul Gordon Lauren is Regents Professor at The University of Montana and the author of eleven books, including the pioneering and widely acclaimed The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen and Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination. His work has been translated into seven languages. He earned his Ph.D. from Stanford University and previously served as the founding director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center and as the Mansfield Professor of Ethics and Public Affairs. Lauren has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a Fulbright Senior Specialist, in addition to receiving many awards for his teaching, research, administrative leadership, and public service. He also has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, lectured widely around the world, and delivered invited addresses at the Smithsonian Institution and the United Nations. The author would like to thank the individuals who granted interviews for this assessment, including those very close both to the Commission on Human Rights and to the recent negotiations over the creation of the Human Rights Council who wish to remain anonymous, to those who are acknowledged in the notes that follow, and to those who offered comments and suggestions, especially the members of the Columbia University Human Rights Seminar. Vol. 29 308 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY

Those familiar with classical European diplomacy will know of the recommendation made many years ago by the astute and renowned French diplomat, Francois de Callieres, that knowledge of diplomatic history should be a fundamental requirement for those involved in and concerned about the determinants and implementation of foreign policy.1 Implicit in his masterful treatise was also the advice that diplomatic historians make every effort to understand the craft of the theoreticians and practitioners of international politics.2 Unfortunately, his recommendations often have gone unheeded. Despite their mutual interest in international relations, diplomatic historians and political scientists frequently disparage the value of synthesis or exaggerate the differences in perspective and methodology between their two disciplines. Contemporary theorists, for example, generally lose the perspective of time by ignoring events from the pre-atomic era; they forfeit many sources of evidence by concentrating primarily on American experience; and they sacrifice much depth and variety by eschewing complex historical facts for abstract models. Historians, on the other hand, frequently are unwilling to explore observable patterns of behaviour, to examine the more recent past, or to learn the language and analytical concepts of the theoreticians.3 It is perhaps for reasons like

Repulsed by atrocities and shocked by the slaughter of millions, representatives from many countries gathered immediately after World War II to assess the cause of the catastrophe they had just experienced. Of all the possible explanations they could have used, these diplomats felt compelled to focus upon only one. "The great and terrible war which has now ended," they poignantly concluded, "was a war made possible by the denial of democratic principles of the dignity, equality, and mutual respect for men, and by the propagation, in their place, through ignorance and prejudice, of the doctrine of the inequality of men and races."' The horrors of this war represented neither the first case of discrimination and the denial of human rights in international politics, nor the last. But their blatant, widespread, and abhorrent nature brought into focus an issue described as "extremely complex,"2 "burning," 3 one of "great delicacy" for the world,4 and, indeed, as