That’s a new body to replace the organization’s discredited Human Rights Commission. Anne Bayevsky has this Council’s first actions pretty well summed up:
In Darfur, there are three quarters of a million people beyond humanitarian reach, 2.5 million people displaced by the violence, 385,000 people in immediate risk of starvation, and over two million dead in 22 years of violence and deprivation.
But it wasn’t genocide in Sudan that interested the Human Rights Council. Nor was it a billion Chinese without civil and political rights. Not 13 million women in Saudi Arabia whose lives depend on hiding from sight in public places and never being caught behind the wheel of an automobile.
Not the dire human rights conditions of 23 million people in North Korea. Not Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s incitement to genocide or his country’s legal system, which includes crucifixion, stoning and amputation.NO, THERE was only one country singled out by the UN Human Rights Council, and that was Israel.
I know – you’re shocked. (Actually, it’s amazing how inured we all are to this stuff now. I’m beginning to realize what it must have been like in Berlin in ’34.)
UPDATE: L’Ombre de l’Olivier has more on “The New ‘Improved’ Human Rights Council.”
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