Naming And Shaming
Well, it's just not to be done. Verbotten. Lest any be offended. Not shamed by the fact that in the opinion of their peer-nations they are odious exemplars of abusive human-rights practitioners, but offended that any other nations consider them to be offenders of basic human rights. What is written in their constitution resulting in primitive punishment practises is legal and beyond reproach.Here's where relativism enters the picture; general cultural/social/traditional practise in one country is another country's darkest vision of failure. But we are not to judge.
What we must do is take into account the fact that a medieval mindset cannot get itself around the fact that all human beings deserve equal, egalitarian consideration. That an even-handed, just and compassionate society does not single out the socially vulnerable for censure and state-controlled punishment. Minority social and religious groups, political dissenters, those whose sexual preferences place them at risk in a dictatorship of the spirit.
And the United Nations has accepted the common front of self-serving arguments of those countries of the world who remain infamous for their abuse of human rights, not to be publicly shamed. The argument being that kindly diplomacy in gently prodding egregious human-rights abusers to behave more moderately can be more efficacious as an instrument of change than pointing fingers and allocating blame.
This will be the fifth year that Canada has undertaken to bring censure upon Iran as a totalitarian theistic regime (its deadly treatment of dissidents, homosexuals, Baha'i, emerging feminists, and others the regime recognizes as social deviants or disruptors within the fundamentalist Islamic community) whose vile maltreatment of its citizens represents violations against humanity.
Canada's draft resolution seeks to have the General Assembly express its "deep concern at the ongoing systematic violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms of the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran." The draft outlines "confirmed instances" of torture, public executions, flogging, amputations and stoning as a method of execution.
All legal and approved by the ruling theocracy as well as their judiciary, upholding the tenets of fundamentalist Shia Islam and interpretations of sharia law.
Iran has her defenders. Unsurprisingly, they are represented by those many other pariah countries of the world whose own abusive human rights records are well known, along with countries for whom Iranian oil has a value which outbalances the universal need to condemn violence against people and invest in the protection of human rights.
One would think there would be little contest, but one would be wrong. Competing interests tend to balance out the scale, where justice hangs on a slender thread between inconvenient acknowledgment and disquieting disinterest.
Labels: Middle East, Political Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, November 09, 2007
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