Bolton Plans to Restart Stalled Efforts to Restructure U.N.

"My biggest concern is it would be a divisive factor in the negotiations," said Peggy Hicks, the global advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

Hicks said that despite the Bush administration's public support for the new council, it has recently played a lackluster role in pressing for its creation. She said the United States has failed to send high-level representatives to the closed-door U.N. negotiations or to forcefully promote proposals to strengthen the council's effectiveness, including a plan to authorize the council to meet anytime throughout the year.

Bolton challenged his critics, saying, "A lot of people mistakenly think that what we're after as part of our reform priority is just management reform. But in fact that is a piece, an important piece, but only a piece of the larger picture, which also encompasses governance reform. . . . The Human Rights Commission is the aspect of governance reform that obviously is ripest and that we have been pressing hardest on and it reflects the almost universal belief that the Human Rights Commission's intergovernmental decision making machinery is broken beyond repair.

"We'd like to see if we can get the commission abolished and the new council put in place before the existing commission meets again in Geneva in a few months," he said.

He said the United States is also sharpening its strategy for upcoming negotiations on U.N. management changes.

Bolton welcomed a recent U.N. decision to strengthen its policy protecting whistle-blowers as "20 years overdue" but said that another U.N. initiative to reinforce its auditing capacity to prevent corruption did not go far enough.

He said that to guide his own negotiations, he has assembled a "matrix" of recommendations for revisions proposed by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul A. Volcker, who led an 18-month investigation of U.N. corruption and mismanagement in Iraq.

"We're going to continue to pursue those, number one, because we think the Volcker Commission made a lot of recommendations that have not yet been addressed and that should be," he said. "And number two, Congress is not going to leave this alone."