Vindication, But Barely
"We ... look forward to the day when the government of Iran will simply acknowledge that it faces human rights issues," said John McNee, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, speaking before delegates at the UN General Assembly's first-line human rights committee. That was putting it kindly. Yet the vote to accept the Canadian-led condemnation of Iran's human-rights abuses just barely squeezed under the yardstick of general agreement.Fact is, Iran was able to muster sufficient support to almost equal those votes which agreed to censure. Fully 78 UN-member countries voted with Iran in its bid for "no action" on the censure bid. The censure against Iran's human-rights record itself did finally pass with 72 to 50, and 55 abstentions. A slim enough margin, roughly approximating the same vote held the previous year, when Canada lobbied endlessly to assure sufficient support to bring Iran's record to public review and censure.
Iran's ambassador to the United Nations unleashed a scathing censure of his own against Canada, qualifying the Canadian-led initiative to embarrass his country and hold it accountable, as a democratic conspiracy. Lending credence to his paranoia was the fact that the draft's 42 co-sponsors all represented western democracies. His denunciation of Canada as itself being a human-rights abusing nation in witness of the plight of its Aboriginal communities came close to the heart of this country's own internal problems.
For it is an indisputable fact that Canada's Aboriginal peoples live in degraded conditions, suffer poor health, their children receiving inadequate educations, live in substandard housing, and exist in an additional burden of high unemployment and a high instance of substance abuse, along with frightening rates of suicide among their young. This is more than an embarrassment for Canada; it is an anguished acknowledgement of fact.
But the added fact is that unlike in countries like Iran where it is government policy to harass, imprison and torture political dissenters, religious minorities, homosexuals, and those impudent enough to engage in civil disobedience, it is government policy in Canada to unendingly grapple with the plight of our First Nations people. It is not for lack of funding, or good intentions, but an intractable problem of providing decent medical care and housing for a proudly self-sequestered people, beset by the problems of balancing traditional lifestyles with modern realities.
In Iran it is in the realm of mundane government-sponsored activities for policing agents and the judiciary to arrest and condemn to prison religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities. The true shame in the proceedings within the United Nations is that an international body such as the United Nations whose purpose is to uphold the universal truths expressed in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is, through the business of its human rights committee, continuing to make a mockery of those values.
Iran's ambassador, in his lengthy speech of condemnation against Canada pointed out its "faulty" voting record in support of Israel, another country which Iran's ambassador points out as representing one whose human rights record like Canada's is grievously unacknowledged for its mendacious human-rights record. If we feel we can afford to be generous about the outcome in the final vote, we can presume to say that the opposing countries agree to disagree.
Bitterly, and with justice on only one side.
Labels: Canada, Justice, World News
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, November 21, 2007
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