A contumelious farce 1

Good and blunt is an article titled Treatment of Libya Illustrates the Fatuousness of the Human Rights Council, by Brett Schaefer at the Heritage Foundation.

Here’s part of it:

On March 18, the United Nations Human Rights Council is scheduled to consider its final report of Libya’s human rights record that was conducted under the body’s Universal Periodic Review. The first part of the human rights review of the “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, conducted on November 9, 2010, was an all too typical dog and pony show. Libya’s submission to the Council asserted that the regime observed and protected a host of basic human rights including freedoms of expression, religion, and association. During the review, governments lined up to commend Libya on its observance of human rights.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) for Libya “scheduled for adoption by the Council … made 66 recommendations for Libya to adopt to improve its human rights practices”. The UPR for the United States made 228 recommendations for the US to “improve its human rights practices.” (See our post, Beyond Outrageous, September 1, 2010.)

So, in the eyes of the Human Rights Council, it seems that the U.S. has much further to go in terms of its observance of human rights than Libya.

Farce has long been a feature of the UPR. … Past UPR sessions have featured countries like China, Cuba, Iran, and North Korea offering false reports to the council, laughably affirming their commitment to fundamental human rights and freedoms. These patently dishonest reports were accepted at face value and approved by the majority of member states in the council. Indeed, these countries received relatively little criticism during their reviews. Meanwhile, the U.S. was grilled relentlessly.

The utter fatuousness of the UPR and the completely unserious and biased nature of the Council’s treatment of human rights were revealed fully by the past few weeks’ events in Libya. Libya’s UPR report up for approval this month duly characterized – without a hint of embarrassment — Qadafhi’s government as (in the summary of Syria’s remarks) a “democratic regime based on promoting the people’s authority” and notable for its commitment to (North Korea) “achievements in the protection of human rights” and for (Algeria) “cooperating with the international community.”

Then suddenly, a few days ago –

The Council approved a resolution that “strongly condemns the recent gross and systematic human rights violations committed in Libya, including indiscriminate armed attacks against civilians, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, detention and torture of peaceful demonstrators, some of which may also amount to crimes against humanity” and recommended that Libya be suspended from the Council by the UN General Assembly.

Which has now been done. But –

Where are the Council’s condemnations of human rights violations and abuses committed by Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia or other countries that have been elected to seats on the Council? It should not take slaughter of civilians to get the Council to accurately and objectively condemn the human rights practices of its members.

But it does take at least as much as that.

The brutal truth is that the Council has proven to be a weak body easily manipulated by repressive regimes to provide a patina of international legitimacy on their abuses. The Bush administration was right to shun the Council …

The Obama administration re-joined it.

The council discusses Israel as a matter of routine at every session. It is the only country in the world assigned a permanent investigator. Over the last five years, the Council has issued 35 condemnations of Israel out of a total of 51; the rest of the world put together only offended it 16 times.

If the UNHRC were to be taken as a guide, who wouldn’t rather live in North Korea where your human rights are protected than in Israel where you will be more abominably oppressed than anywhere else on earth?

The Human Rights Council is a contumelious farce, as corrupt and pernicious as the UN itself.

The UN delenda est. The entire UN must be destroyed.