Of the many slaps that the Bush Administration has taken at multilateralism, one that passed unremarked by most of the US was its obsessive attempt at the UN in 2002 to block the adoption of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture. The Optional Protocol was the product of more than 10 years of negotiations by states in a Working Group of the UN Commission on Human Rights. It was adopted at the UN General Assembly in December 2002 by vote of 127-4 (with the US, Marshall Islands Palau and Nigeria as the only no votes). It will come into force in the next year or two, after 25 states have ratified the treaty.
The Optional Protocol sets up a Committee of experts that undertakes visits to prisons and other places of detention with a view to preventing torture; The Committee then reports and makes recommendations to state governments. States that are parties to the Optional Protocol are also required to set up some kind of visiting system at the national level.
The Optional Protocol is not about denouncing countries or weeding out and prosecuting torturers. It is a modest, but important, attempt to assist states in their own efforts to prevent and eradicate the practice of torture. It is entirely optional- states that are parties to the Convention against Torture can sign on to the optional protocol or can choose not to do so.
In Europe, there has long existed a similar mechanism under the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, to which most European states have signed on. It has been highly successful and that success has encouraged many states, particularly those from Latin America, to work to establish a similar regime at the global level.
In 2002, when delegations finally achieved a compromise on the Optional Protocol acceptable to most countries after 10 years of difficult negotiations, the US went into overdrive to block its adoption at four levels: at the Working Group, at the Human Rights Commission, at the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and finally at the UN General Assembly. All through the process, US diplomats contrived various incoherent and ever shifting arguments as to why it should not be adopted. The arguments ranged from complaints about the cost (with the insistence by the US delegation that it "was not placing a price on torture") to the unbelievable argument that allowing human rights experts into prisons would violate the privacy rights of the prisoners!
To most observers, including those who had worked long and hard for the establishment of the optional protocol, the US posture was one not only of frustration, but also of bafflement. What could be causing this irrational resistance to such a benign initiative? The Optional Protocol, after all, was, well, optional- there was no requirement that the US become a party (although many sorely wished it would), so why would it go itself into diplomatic contortions to prevent other countries from seizing on an opportunity to help prevent torture? Could it have to do with UN politics? No, because the Optional Protocol was diplomatically driven by Latin American and European allies, with Costa Rica and Switzerland in the lead; no obvious political overtones.
But now recent developments have come to light make that make it all clear: Rendition and the contracting out of torture. For it seems that it was not visit to US places of detention that was of paramount concern. Rather, the Bush administration, and its Pentagon, CIA and Justice Department minions, have been trying to ensure that detainees of interest can be tortured with impunity, without the inconvenient obstacle of pesky human rights inspections. If countries to which the US is "rendering" detainees so they can be interrogated under torture would allow international inspectors in, the task would be complicated.
Many are coming to grips with just how depraved and criminal the Bush administrations human rights record has been on so many levels. Those who witnessed governments of states with very serious torture problems plead with the US not to block the adoption of a UN mechanism that could help them in efforts to bring wayward security and prison officials under control were shaking their heads in astonishment in 2002.