The UN (more)

The UN continues to demonstrate that it has indeed been hijacked by statesmen and stateswomen who have a truly bizarre sense of what constitutes appropriate behavior of equality, fairness, and safety of human life by its member states. This is true as Kahntentions cited yesterday, but it now has been trumped by events which only have emerged.

Yesterday, the United Nations Human Rights Council continued its UN charade when the 47 Member group praised President Qaddafi’s human rights record and unanimously adopted a U.N. report, over the objections from outside groups. Libya had been admitted to the Council in 2010 and then the human rights report which was subsequently issued had been pummeled in the press when it was first released last year. So extensive was the attack against the whitewash of Libyan human rights abuses, that the Council’s adoption of the report had been postponed until now; despite the fact that Libya lost its seat on the Council. As Hillel Neuer, the director of UN Watch observed, it was as if the Ghost of Qaddafi was haunting the Human Rights Council

This action by the Council was actually topped last week when UNESCO adopted a resolution by a vote of 35-8 which condemned Assad’s abuses of human rights in Syria, but permitted Syria to remain as a member of the Council. The U.S. mounted a major protest against this action and sought to have Syria expelled; but the UN, in its abundant wisdom, voted otherwise. It is an ironic footnote that Syria obtained its seat on the Council when it was selected to replace the one vacated by Libya’s expulsion.

These relatively minor committee actions only underscore the UN’s extraordinary difficulty in addressing the world’s real peace-keeping needs. If one considers the temerity of the UN to act in so many places in the world where human suffering continues unabated—Syria being only the current enfant terrible—the events occurring in Geneva are laughable, were they not so sad.

Kahntentions

comments