Marshall Islands was elected on Wednesday to sit on the United Nations Human Rights Council from next year, with climate change and nuclear justice as its top priorities.
Currently there are no Pacific Island nations represented on the 47-member peak UN human rights body.
Marshall Islands stood with the full backing of the Pacific Islands Forum and its 18 presidents and prime ministers.
The HRC’s mission is to promote and protect human rights and oversee UN processes, including investigative mechanisms and to advise the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Addressing the General Assembly in September, Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine warned that “common multilateral progress is failing us in the hour of greatest need, perhaps most at risk are human rights.”
She said accountability must apply to all nations “without exception or double standard.”
“Our own unique legacy and complex challenges with nuclear testing impacts, with climate change, and other fundamental challenges, informs our perspective, that the voices of the most vulnerable must never be drowned out,” she said in New York on 25 September.
At the 57th session of the Human Rights Council two days later in Geneva, she made a specific plea, for it to recognise the impact of the nuclear legacy left by U.S atomic tests in her country.
“Despite these wrongs, for almost 80 years, we have not received an official apology. There has been no meaningful reconciliation, and we continue to seek redress,” Heine said, as she pitched for a seat on the UN body.
“It is my sincere hope that this Council will continue to keep the human rights of the Marshallese people at heart, when considering the matters that we bring before it for consideration,” she said.
Sixty-seven nuclear weapon tests were conducted between 1946 and 1958 while the Marshall Islands were under UN Trusteeship and administered by the United States government.
“The Marshallese people were misled, forcibly displaced and subjected to scientific experimentation without their consent,” she told the council, adding that despite Marshallese requests to the UN for the tests to stop, they were allowed to continue.
Marshall Islands is considered extremely vulnerable to sea-level rise, cyclones, drought and other impacts of climate change. A 2-degree Celsius increase to global temperatures above pre-industrial levels is expected to make the low-lying atoll state’s existence tenuous.
In 2011, Marshall Islands along with Palau issued a pioneering call at the General Assembly, to urgently seek an advisory opinion on climate change from the International Court of Justice on industrialised nations’ obligations to reduce carbon emissions.
While they were unsuccessful then, it laid the foundation for a resolution finally adopted in 2023, with the ICJ due to begin public hearings this December.
Heine has been highly critical of the wealthy nations who “break their pledges, as they double down on fossil fuels.”
“This failure of leadership must stop. No new coal mines, no new gas fields, no new oil wells,” she told the General Assembly.
When Marshall Islands takes up its council seat next year, it will be alongside Indonesia and France.
Both have been in Heine’s sights over the human and self-determination rights of the indigenous people of the Papuan provinces and New Caledonia respectively.
For years Indonesia has rebuffed a request from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights for an independent fact-finding mission in Papua and ignored the Pacific Islands Forum’s calls since 2019 to allow it to go ahead.
“We support ongoing Forum engagement with Indonesia and West Papua, to better understand stakeholders, and to ensure human rights,” she told the General Assembly.
In May, deadly violence erupted in New Caledonia over a now abandoned French government proposal to dilute the Kanak vote, which would put the success of any future independence referendum for the territory out of reach.
Heine said she “looks forward to the upcoming high-level visit” by PIF leaders to New Caledonia. No dates have been agreed.
Countries elected to the council are expected to demonstrate their commitment to the UN’s human rights standards and mechanisms.
An analysis of Marshall Islands votes during its only previous term with the council in 2021 by Geneva-based think tank Universal Rights Group found it joined the consensus or voted in favor of almost all resolutions.
Exceptions include resolutions on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories where it “has generally voted against,” the report released ahead of the HRC election said.
As part of its bid to join the council, Marshall Islands committed to reviewing U.N. instruments it has not yet signed, including protocols on civil and political rights, abolition of the death penalty, torture and rights of children.
