Sepp Blatter, Jack Warner Tapped To Head Human Rights Council

The Council can no longer ignore the bush-league quality of its own corruption.

Geneva, June 22 – Exposure of a massive corruption scandal with world soccer’s governing organization at its center has helped the United Nations Human Rights Council find its next presidents, sources within the Council report.

Last month several high-ranking FIFA officials were arrested in Switzerland on corruption charges, amid an ongoing investigation by American authorities, with Swiss cooperation. The initial wave of arrests did not include FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter, but he announced his resignation within a week, after a brief period of insisting he would remain in office and had nothing to hide. That level of hypocrisy and chutzpah, coupled with the greed and dishonesty coming to light as more information on the scandal is released, prompted the Human Rights Council to immediately seek a rotating presidency between Blatter, who is from Switzerland, and Jack Warner of Trinidad, one of the most prominent FIFA officials to be caught up in the scandal.

Wikileaks documents released in the last two days have offered evidence of how some of the most egregious human rights violators attain a seat on the Council, a process that includes everything from simple political horse trading to outright bribery. However, the Council realized that the FIFA corruption in which Mr. Warner played a key part, and which Mr. Blatter fostered, dwarfs UNHRC malfeasance by several orders of magnitude.

“Human Rights Council corruption has mostly been confined to the realm of electing members,” explained Phil Thilucre. “Human rights paragons such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, for example, cut deals involving reciprocal voting, while others are seen to have paid off whoever is necessary to secure the right votes. But that’s small potatoes as far as FIFA is concerned; the Council can no longer ignore the bush-league quality of its own corruption. If it wants to play the game properly, it needs to recruit people who have the experience and the street cred to take the corruption beyond mere Realpolitik and make it an integral part of the organization at every level.”

Another important change that Blatter, at least, can accomplish involves improving the Council’s appearance of objectivity, at least where criticism of Israel is concerned. To date, the UNHRC has clumsily given Israeli behavior, however minor, disproportionate focus and weight, while treating true human rights violators almost as an afterthought. The obvious bias has limited the Council’s credibility. Blatter himself took a noticeable pro-Israel stance recently, speaking out against a Palestinian proposal to expel Israel from FIFA over alleged abuses of Palestinian players. A reputation for keeping an organization under his aegis above nakedly political activity could provide an important fig leaf for the Human Rights Council while it maintains its customary anti-Israel prejudice.

Warner, for his part, has already expressed interest in the job, which would allow him to engage in the same behavior in a context where no one actually cares, as opposed to the storm that FIFA corruption generated. Confidantes report that his only hesitation was a limit on the term of the presidency, but that the members of the Council do not tend to put much stock in following constitutional or democratic norms to begin with, so they would be unlikely to care if he keeps the position, by force if necessary, after the formal term ends.