The United Nations Human Rights Council needs to take action on crises in Darfur and Sri Lanka to secure its credibility and usher in a new era of rights monitoring, activists said on Sunday.
Rights groups want the forum, launched this year to succeed the largely-discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights, to confront a wide range of violations when it opens its second regular session on Monday.
The three-week-long meeting is seen as a litmus test for the Council's 47 member states, who will have their first chance to examine and condemn atrocities after a mainly procedural initial meeting in June.
"This is going to be the session which tell us whether the Council is serious. Now is the time for action," Reed Brody, legal counsel of the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, told Reuters in an interview.
"There are a number of areas like Sri Lanka and Darfur where it could take action to save lives," he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned last week of "yet more death and suffering, perhaps on a catastrophic scale" in Darfur, a region of Sudan where fighting between government troops, rebels and militias has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million since 2003.
Brody said the Council should send fact-finding missions and support the deployment of human rights monitors in places where civilians are at risk, including Sri Lanka, where a new bout of fighting between government forces and Tamil Tigers has caused the island's worst bloodshed since a 2002 ceasefire.
WORRYING SIGNS
The Council was created to sidestep the bitter political acrimony and selectivity which plagued its 60-year-old predecessor, which was widely criticised for allowing rights abusers to block efforts to address atrocities.
But the new body is already showing worrying signs of slipping into old divisive patterns, activists warned.
At the request of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, the world's largest Muslim body, it held special sessions in July and August condemning Israel for alleged rights violations in the Palestinian territories and for its war in Lebanon.
The militant groups Hamas and Hizbollah escaped rebuke in the Council's resolutions, which were dismissed as one-sided by Israel and its ally the United States -- neither of which holds a seat at the Geneva-based body.
"The Council's two special sessions were the old Commission at its worst. It got off on a bad foot," Peter Splinter, Amnesty International's representative in Geneva, told Reuters.
"We hope the Council will have something to say about the critical situations on the ground in Darfur and Sri Lanka which are getting much worse," he added.
Others said the upcoming session will test the Council's ability to move past political sensitivies over the Middle East and tackle a wide range of issues.
"The vast majority of the world's human rights abuses have been ignored," Hillel Neuer, executive director of the non-governmental group U.N. Watch, told a news briefing.
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) called on the Council to condemn "massive human rights violations" in Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Central African Republic and Iran.
