generalspeaking

All's Right With The World

Oh, good. New members of the United Nation's human rights council have been welcomed into the fold. Fourteen new members of the 47-nation Human Rights Council.

It's such a great relief that the Council is now on full strength, so that it can ably turn its concerned attention to matters of international human rights support. Of course it makes eminently good sense to reasonably anticipate that any UN member-countries elected to the HRC are themselves upstanding human-rights protecting countries.

Like Libya, for example. Of course Uganda, Mauritania, Malaysia, Qatar, Ecuador and Guatemala also were elected by the General Assembly. All exemplars of human rights protection.

So it makes eminently good sense that they shall sit in judgement of the UN's other member countries, all 192 of them. And gently chide them when and if the occasion arises, exhorting them to attention. Yet despite they apply themselves so rigorously to the matter at hand they are somehow unable to identify any human-rights abusers with one exception.

An obvious exception, one known almost instinctively by most countries of the world as an oppressively dictating occupying country, with an intolerable record of human rights abuses. Somalia? Sudan? North Korea? Pakistan? China? Burma? Saudi Arabia? Rwanda? Democratic Republic of Congo? No to all of these? Were there some we missed?

Oh, Israel! Right, how forgetful we can be.

So the newly elected fourteen, which number also includes respectable Spain and Switzerland, are set to serve three-year terms. Sounds fair. Too bad Iran missed out there. The Islamic Republic of Iran was quite committed to taking its place on the UN Human Rights Council, feeling it was their due to be there.

And, in fact, they would have fit right in there, so what went wrong?

Oh, some assembly members led by the United States expressed doubt about Iran's human rights record? Isn't that odd? How is Iran all that much different from say, North Korea, Syria, Libya (we're talking about sponsoring terror groups, and surrogate militias, big time), after all?

Funny thing about Libya's placement on the HRC; a coalition of 30 NGOs, including many from Africa, along with Libyan victims' groups appealed to the U.S. and E.U. to block Libya.
There are those so out of touch with reality that they seem to believe that to be fit to serve with the UNHRC candidates must hold inviolable values upholding universal human rights.

But Libya, a sponsor of terror groups, and deeply involved with state terror in its own right, has held other important UN posts; on the U.N. Security Council and the revolving presidency of the U.N. General Assembly.

The UN: flying on a wing and a prayer.

Labels: Human Relations, Human Rights, Political Realities, United Nations

posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 14, 2010