Membership of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC) has always been a rogue’s gallery of some of the world’s most oppressive nations trying to obstruct its work or artificially rehabilitate their images. Now to add insult to countless human rights injuries, Saudi Arabia wants to head the HRC. That’s right. The country that will not allow any other religion to build a simple church or place of worship in the Kingdom. The country that executes people for apostasy for simply praying to the God of their choice. The country that imprisons and flogs women for driving, adultery, or people accused of sorcery. The country that is the greatest exporter of the extreme Sharia values that are stripping away rights in various countries. The country that cuts off the hands of thieves. The country that denies free speech and executes people in intersections for things like drug dealing. That country.
As the Kingdom seeks new executioners to meet the high demand for amputations and executions, it is seeking the top position on the HRC to lead the world on human rights.
U.N. Watch has called the effort “the final nail in the coffin for the credibility” of the HRC. Countries like Iran, China, and others have turned the HRC into a joke in recent years.
The question will be whether the Obama Administration will do what prior administrations have failed to do: stand up to Saudi Arabia and move to block its influence.
Karen S … I have to confess I pay little attention to the various UN commissions, and the Human Rights version has been a soiled toilet for years now. I know of no “enforcement” authority they have, but some one please correct me if I am wrong. I just like to have them periodically where they can be easily watched and heard. If nothing else, I’d guess they help NYC’s economy now and then by their visits.
Aridog – I see what you’re saying about the UN providing a venue for everyone to get together. What do you propose to do about human rights violators taking over the Human Rights Coalition of the UN? Does that not give them enforcement power over their political opponents?
Everyone likes to have a voice, even if inconsequential. The UN provides that for the multitude of states and I’d not want them gone. People are always going to talk and talk to each other…so when they gather in NYC they talk. And our security services are right there to listen to every word. The concept of the old CIA of bow tied Ivy Leaguers isn’t my experience…which was with some pretty rough scruffy people who had no trouble in jungles or arid deserts. The traditional Pashtun hat I have that I love for winter weather came from an Intelligence Service officer who lived as a native in Afghanistan and sent me the hat as a souvenir. I may decry the senior leadership, but I know the working stiffs are not among the bow tied types of any era.
Corruption? Yep, the UN has it press down and running over. But nothing stops us from selectively supporting programs or choosing not to do so at all. What are they (the UN) gonna do?
More corrupt than the Dem Chicago Machine. Try and wrap your head around that!
There is no organization more corrupt than the UN. Even more corrupt than FIFA, by far, on a $ basis.
The UN, and especially its Human Rights Council, has been a joke for many years. We should use this as the final straw to withdraw, as no one can seriously claim the HRC cares about human rights.
I dislike our Machiavellian choices regarding Saudi Arabia. We dread angering OPEC, because we don’t want to repeat the Oil Embargo of the 1970s, and we’re loathe to lose our fair weather ally and bases in the ME. The first step towards being able to vote with our conscious is energy independence. Because right now we’re still over an OPEC barrel.
Mike Morgan – I agree. I think we should fund charities directly rather than waste so much through the UN bureaucracy and graft. Plus there was that whole scandal about UN schools hiring terrorist teachers.
Regarding the functioning of the UN and its affiliate organizations, the dozens of impoverished and corrupt nations that are included, to some degree, as equal partners create a sort of sea anchor. They keep the organization from sailing off in one direction or another but they also keep the organization from sailing off in one direction or the other.
Too many chefs, and too much money needed by poorer nations to circulate at the expensive levels set by the richer nations. I remember in the late fifties and early sixties when heroes like Dag Hammarskjold and Lester Pearson created UN forces that could intervene in the squabbles between small warring nations. The idea then was for a UN strike force that could parachute into a beleaguered nation and sort things out. The UN was then thought to be destined to be able to distribute relief supplies directly to the people. Now the UN’s military wing is toothless. The supplies are delivered to corrupt leaders who sell them for money to buy arms.
The UN is still vitally necessary as a forum for as many nations as can be brought to the table. However, the original intentions of a World Police Force was merely a momentary pipe dream. The world does need, in some areas, a strike force. The British, French, Belgians, and later the Americans caused most of the problems of inability and chaos in Africa and the Middle East. Between colonial partitioning of ethnic lands into dysfunctional countries to corporate corruption stabilizing dictatorships/kingdoms, the West should be called upon to form a strike force to sort out the whackos that are slaughtering and destroying the areas. There need be no permission from the UN or from the nations involved; just go in and wax ISIS, Boko Harum, and Mumbo Jumbo. The longer this is put off the worse the cancer.
The other hand can send in relief supplies and distribute, not deliver, for the hungry. Infastructure can be built and rebuilt directly by corporations like those that are demonized in the US. Better the US gets the profits than the corrupt dictators. They can hire the locals to build the bridges and stuff but they won’t get done unless Western corporations build them. Regarding all the useless construction done in Afghanistan and Iraq by Halliburton and the rest, the reason for that was and continues to be leadership incompetence in the US.
Ari, I’m not certain how much intelligence is gathered @ UN, embassies, consulates, etc. any longer. I know there is some info gathered, but the CIA still has not made the transition from the Cold War Days where that was where the action was. We had Ivy Leaguers being CIA and blending in well in those venues back in the day. Now, it’s down and very dirty. Bow ties don’t make it in the huts and tents of the Middle East.
That is YOUR scientist. He refused to persist in telling YOUR lie. I am very sorry for YOUR loss.
You appear like a child in a sandbox. Waaaaaaaaa! “I’m right and you’re wrong, despite the facts, so there,” the baby cried. Normally, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” sticks together – teacher unions strike and everybody else gets “comparable pay,” right? You just come unglued when a truth-telling defector emerges. What you refuse to give up on is your attempt, after the fall of communism, to establish a new ideology
based on your new lie.
Funny thing is that YOUR tyranny is why the American Founders established a restricted-vote republic. They feared a vote of the working masses. They eschewed the participation of the inane, self-indulgent self-deluders.
The American founding paradigm has succeeded, however, in China, which does not focus on coddling the lazy in a welfare state AKA one-man one-vote democracy. The Chinese restricted-vote republic has facilitated a freedom and free enterprise juggernaut that put up 50 New York Cities in a short span of time, and is creating enormous wealth and burgeoning billionaires as it gobbles up the world like Pac Man on its inexorable advance to stern global hegemony.