Alternatives?

Now to the central issue, IMHO. (While the Norwegian foreign minister is giving a speech that criticizes Ahmadinejad.)

Many critics of the Durban process have argued that the problem with it is interference ("hijacking") from single-issue advocates: instead of talking about the specific problem of this or that minority, oppressed group etc, the focus should be on universal principles. (This is basically what the Norwegian minister is saying as I am writing this.) That critique is of course understandable, given the crushing weight of the Israel/Palestine issue at both conferences. However, the question, to my mind, is how a debate on universals is supposed to take place without being based on particular cases. The process of forming universal norms is always one of "formatting" individual cases in different ways, debating different ways of generalizing from the particular, and finding compromises between these ways.
Recent research on the history of the Genocide Convention and its author, Raphael Lemkin, has shown how Lemkin's work grew out of his concern with the specific instances of mass violence he was concerned with and the need to placate political interests such as US criticism of the USSR in the early years of the Cold War. (See e.g. the Lemkin issue in the Journal of Genocide Research, 2005.) The same goes, of course, for any such text or institution.

What is interesting, from my perspective, is to study why, and in what situations, some people find it advantageous to fight for a universal norm. There is a clear discrepancy between countries here, which goes some way toward explaining the West-South imbalance in the Durban process: dissenters and rights defenders in non-Western countries are especially interested in obtaining universal norms as a tool of leverage against their own governments (I'm thinking of the Helsinki principles and their impact on the Soviet bloc). In the US, for example, this is not much of an issue: Did the NAACP, for example (probably the world's largest antiracist organization in terms of membership and contributions), even send a representative to the Review Conference?