Bolton said the draft submitted to the 191-nation assembly last week contains 'deficiencies' and Washington has demanded 'several months' in order to reopen negotiations. He said the president of the General Assembly, Jan Eliasson of Sweden, intends to call for a vote in a day or two.
'If he continues on that course and calls for a vote, we will vote no,' Bolton told reporters.
The draft aims to create a body to replace the current Human Rights Commission, flawed because it allows countries that violate human rights - like Cuba and Sudan - onto the panel. The new council is a lynch-pin to moving ahead with UN reform, and was intended to be in place by next month.
But the proposal falls short of standards set by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the US and several Western nations, who wanted to require a two-thirds majority for admission, and who wanted more clear standards for measuring whether countries are upholding the highest human rights standards.
Instead, the draft requires only a simple majority for admission, and makes it more difficult to eject someone from the council for human rights violations by requiring a two-thirds majority. It also fails to specify how a country's human rights performance would be measured.
Bolton last week rejected the draft, while Annan expressed disappointment but decided to go along with it.
Since the draft was made public, advocates like Human Right Watch and Amnesty International voiced support for it.
A group of 12 Nobel Peace Prize laureates has endorsed the draft and urged the UN General Assembly to adopt it. They include former US President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez.
Bolton said he has been instructed by Washington to seek a postponement of the vote so he can gain support among UN members to mount 'real international negotiations.' But the United States has no veto right in the General Assembly, and the measure would likely pass if put to a vote.
Bolton reacted quickly last week when the draft was made public, but he said Monday that it was 'more in sorrow than in anger' that he opposed the text to set up a brand new human rights body to replace the discredited UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
The actual proposal calls for a 47-member council divided among the world regions: 13 from Africa, 13 from Asia, 6 from Eastern Europe, 8 from Latin American and the Caribbean, 7 from Western Europe and other countries like the US, Canada and Israel.
The draft was hammered out through months of intense negotiations attended by UN members, including the five UN Security Council permanent members: the US, Russia, China, France and Britain.
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