The U.N. General Assembly president wants a vote next week on a resolution for a new Human Rights Council but the United States has called for reopening negotiations that some fear might sink the proposal.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, as well as major rights groups, said the compromise draft resolution, unveiled on Thursday by assembly President Jan Eliasson, fell short of their proposals for a smaller, stronger body to name and shame abusers and help nations devise rights laws.

But they said it was an improvement over the discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission -- where human rights violators such as Libya, Sudan and Zimbabwe had seats and prevented action against other abusers.

"It's not everything we asked for, but I think it is a credible basis to push ahead," said Annan, who proposed the new council in March. "The member states have had enough time to discuss it ... and now is the time for a decision."

However, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said one option was opening negotiations among governments rather than Eliasson's system of intermediaries or facilitators to sound out nations. He said Washington would review the issue.

"The facilitator process is a process where everybody talks and then the oracle thinks about it and then comes up with the text as opposed to international negotiations where you put a text on the table and mark it up," Bolton told reporters.

"That has not really occurred and that is something we'll now have to consider launching to see if we can correct the deficiencies in this draft," he said.

"The strongest argument in favor of this draft is that it's not as bad as it could be," Bolton added.

DEADLOCK FEARED
New negotiations could result in a line-by-line parsing of the text. Supporters of the resolution fear this would open the door to opponents of a new council and produce a deadlock.

Reopening talks could lead to "death by 1,000 cuts," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch
Eliasson's resolution would replace the current 53-member commission with a 47-member council that would be elected by an absolute majority of the 191-member General Assembly.

Annan, the United States and others had wanted a two-thirds majority to make it easier to keep countries with poor human rights records off the council. They also wanted a smaller, more nimble body of about 30 and Bolton proposed disqualifying any nation under sanctions in the U.N. Security Council.

U.S. Republican members of Congress seek to make the formation of a new council, a reform demanded by world leaders at a U.N. summit in September, one condition for U.S. payment of U.N. dues.

South Africa and Costa Rica, mediators in the negotiations, are lining up other developing countries behind it. However, Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram, said he would not oppose new negotiations if members wanted it.

"There are of course several issues which we had raised that are not resolved," he said.

One, he said, was language on religion and blasphemy that was watered down and put in the preamble rather than the operative part of the text. Another was a review of members rights records that he said was "lacking in clarity."

Ten human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Carter Center, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in support of the resolution because it represented "a concrete step in the right direction," and asked for an urgent meeting.

Source: Reuters