For the first time, a United Nations organization condemned anti-Semitism today as a violation of human rights.
In a broad resolution condemning abuses, the Human Rights Commission expressed concern that "racism, racial discrimination, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and related intolerance, as well as acts of racial violence, persist and are even growing in magnitude, continually assuming new forms." The resolution passed unanimously.
The commission also instructed a United Nations investigator to report broadly on incidents of prejudice to its next meeting.
The panel, the main United Nations human rights organization, named Maurice Glele Ahanhanzou of Benin, who investigates racial prejudice on its behalf, to examine "incidents of contemporary racism, racial discrimination, any form of discrimination against blacks, Arabs and Muslims, negrophobia, anti-Semitism and related intolerance, as well as governmental measures to overcome them," and to report next year.
The commission's decision to include anti-Semitism in its investigation comes three years after a successful American-led campaign resulted in the repeal by the General Assembly of a 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism.
But the vote today also means the United Nations has waited 49 years to decide that anti-Semitism is a violation of human rights, even though the human rights provisions of its founding charter were heavily influenced by American and allied horror at the Nazis' "final solution" in World War II.
Today, for the fourth time since the Tiananmen Square massacre, China successfully escaped censure over its human rights record, just as Secretary of State Warren Christopher is warning Beijing that it faces possible loss of trading privileges in the United States unless it gives its people more freedom.
But the commission voted to censure the human rights records of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Togo, the Sudan and Haiti, and of all three parties to the Yugoslav conflict, particularly the Serbs.
And before it winds up at the end of the week, it is expected to criticize, in varying degrees, the human rights performance of other countries, including Myanmar, Zaire, Albania, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Romania, Somalia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chad, Rwanda and Indonesia, particularly for abuses in East Timor.
The Human Rights Commission has also agreed to appoint investigators to look into violence against women and the independence of judges all over the world, asking them to report on the prevalence of human rights abuses in these fields at next year's session.
This brings to 11 the number of such investigations the commission makes yearly and which now cover fields like disappearances, torture, summary executions and detention, and the sale and abuse of children.
It also further expands the only real power the commission possesses, which is to try to shame governments into treating their populations better by publicizing abuses.
The decision to name anti-Semitism specifically as a form of human rights abuse was worked out between the United States and Turkey.
But the price the United States and other supporters had to pay for unanimous commission support was to include a long list of other forms of racial prejudice in the condemnation including discrimination against Arabs, Muslims, blacks and, at Nigeria's insistence, "negrophobia."
The United States and Western Europe also pressed hard for the commission to condemn China's human rights performance today, arguing that to do so would show it is not an organization that only takes on weak countries and is afraid to criticize the powerful.
"Let us do what we were sent here to do -- decide important questions of human rights on their merits, not avoid them," the head of the United States delegation, Geraldine Ferraro, told the commission.
But the effort failed when the commission voted, 20 to 16, with 17 abstentions, to approve a Chinese motion urging that there be no further action on the resolution.
