You should be. Under President Obama, the U.S. is in now in the running for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council — reversing the Bush policy of refusing to dignify with a U.S. presence this favorite nesting place of thug regimes. As part of the U.S. bid, Obama’s ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, has written a pledge letter explaining what the U.S. wishes to offer the Council.
Along with bringing fresh pots of American taxpayer dollars for the UN to spend (as detailed in my column this week for Forbes.com, U.S. Seeks to Join a Despots’ Club ) , Rice stresses that the U.S. “looks forward” to the Council reviewing America’s own record. And who exactly will be the colleague UN member states who will help oversee this exercise which the U.S. will now not merely tolerate, but actively invite?
Well, the UN Human Rights Council is notorious as a place where the worst violators of human rights like to join and then flock together as a sort of mutual protection society — prone to redefining human rights as the rights of despotic regimes to do whatever they want to humans. Also in the running alongside America for the 18 seats coming open this year on the 47-member Human Rights Council are such states as Saudi Arabia, Cuba, China, Russia, Cameroon and Djibouti. Most of them are likely to win “election” in the UN General Assembly’s secret write-in balloting next Tuesday. Care to guess what they’ll prescribe for “human rights” reforms in America?
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