UN Human Rights Council

The structural deficiencies of the UN are once again on display, with the recent activities of the UN Human Rights Council.

First of all they elected Jean Ziegler to the council’s advisory committee. Ziegler has compared Israeli soldiers to concentration camp guards and lauding a professed Holocaust denier. Even better he, get this, co-founded in 1989 the Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize. He founded this four months after Libya bombed Pam Am Flight 103 killing 270 people.

Winners of his Prize has been Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and a leader of a Ba’ath party women’s organisation in Saddam’s Iraq. plus oh yeah Ziegler himself.

He also nicely helped the Ethiopian dictator Mengistu draft his one-party constitution and in 2002, he praised the Zimbabwean dictator, saying, “Mugabe has history and morality with him.”

But he is not against human rights.  He has proclaimed the US a dictatorship guility of genocide, and oh yes western capitalism leaders deliberately organising starvation as a “weapon of mass destruction”.

So what else is the UN Human Rights Council doing. It has voted to urge nation states to ban defamation of religion. God forbid, religions are criticised.

But there may be some good news. They have directed a special investigator to concentrate on free speech and expression. Oh, but not to defend it. No, no. Their job is now to report on people who “abuse” free speech. They explain they are not against all free speech, just that free speech must be exercised responsibly.

Reporters Without Borders have said, the U.N. body was focusing on limiting criticism of state and religious interests. Amnesty International said the resolution showed “troubling signs that the Council is moving away from its mandate to promote human rights in the direction of policing the exercise of human rights.”

Oh while busy worried about the scourge of free speech, they were unable to find time to address human rights violations in Tibet.  But they did have time to declare climate change a human rights issue.

It would be funny if it was not so dangerous. And it is no surprise. I blogged two years ago about how this new UN Human Rights Council was no different to its discredited predecessor. The ultimate irony is that this body is funded 95% by the countries with the best human rights records so those countries with the worst human rights records can pass resolutions which undermine human rights.

Hat Tip: The Hive