Human Rights: the People vs the UN
Global Research -
As the US government is re-elected to the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Committee Against Torture hears a complaint against Bush.
The recent death of Iranian dissident blogger Sattar Beheshti in police custody was a sad event. All human life is precious. “If anyone kills a person unless in retribution for murder or spreading corruption in the land – it is as if he kills all humanity,” states the Quran. An investigation by the Tehran prosecutor, the head of Tehran police and the head of Tehran prisons was ordered by Iranian parliament and Beheshti’s interrogators were hauled on the carpet.
At the same time, the US was elected to a second three-year term on the 47-member United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC). President Bush boycotted the HRC for criticizing Israel too much, but Obama joined in 2010 to ‘improve’ it. US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice welcomed Washington’s re-election this week, saying that the HRC “has delivered real results”, citing its criticism of Syria, though she criticized the rights council’s continued “excessive and unbalanced focus on Israel”.
US emphasis on the HRC is on freedom of expression, religion, and the rights of women and gays, and of course criticism of Iran. Beheshti’s case will surely be raised by the US rep in the near future.
The US government-funded Freedom House huffed that seven of the countries on the HRC – Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, UAE, and Venezuela – are “unqualified for membership” on a body that requires members to “uphold the highest standards regarding human rights”, and that the qualifications of Brazil, Kenya, and Sierra Leone were “questionable”.
What about the US ‘qualifications’? During its first term, the US *continued its illegal occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq (1.5 million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the US invasion in 2003) *used its veto at the UN to conemn Israeli human rights violations (the 2009 invasion of Gaza killed 1400) *accelerated its use of drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia (3,400 have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone since 2004) *persecuted Wikileaks’ Julian Assange for his attempts to give substance to the concept of ‘freedom of expression’ in the interests of curbing US war fever.
The ongoing trial of US Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers – “heinous and despicable crimes” according to the prosecutor – makes you stop and think: each day, US troops, carry out similar mass executions in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and, in connivance with Israel, in Palestine.
The alleged comment by Stalin to Churchill is chillingly apropos: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
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2012-11-20 05:02:15
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