UN elects rights violators to Human Rights Council

Source: AP

Seven countries accused of human rights violations, including Libya, Angola and Malaysia, won seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council in an uncontested election Thursday.

The U.N. General Assembly approved all 14 candidates for the 14 seats on the 47-member council by wide margins despite campaigns by human rights groups to deny countries with poor rights records the minimum number of votes needed.

All 14 countries easily topped the 97 votes required from the 192-member world body. Libya, which currently holds the presidency of the General Assembly, received the lowest number of votes - 155 - while Angola got 170 and Malaysia 179.

Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_UN_HUMAN_RIGHTS_COUNCIL?SITE=NVELK&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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This is very disappointing to me. It seems that human rights are taking a back seat almost everywhere. Talk about the fox watching the hen house.

How soon will torture of American Citizens be authorized?

We in the USA should be concerned with nixing The Patriot Act FIRST before we bitch about other countries breeching Human Rights.

Talk about your slippery slopes. :scared:

And we would have done nothing to stop the genocide that happened in the Balkans during the 90's and we would do nothing about the death squads in Honduras. Yes, we should be concerned with the Parrot Act and other things, but we should be able to do some multitasking and show concern for what is going on in the rest of the world at the same time.

The world either loathes and/or fears us. It's time to get our own house in MORAL order.

From the article:'The council, however, has also been widely criticized for failing to change many of the commission's practices, including putting much more emphasis on Israel than on any other country.'

It really does come across like how much attention a country gets for human rights violations is far more important than the fact that it carries out human rights violations. And that sometimes the same people who claim to be disappointed by the human rights records of third world countries sing a whole different tune and either turn a blind eye or deny that human rights violations are carried out by countries such as Israel, the US and other Western countries.

btw, the article claims human rights organisations were involved in a campaign to stop those countries gaining a seat. Which human rights groups? Amnesty International? Human Rights Watch? I'm a bit suspicious after reading this bit at the end of the article where it talks about a partisan pro-Israel advocacy group that is obsessed with Israel and defends anything and everything it does as being merely a coalition of human rights organisations:

'Hillel Neuer, executive director of Geneva-based UN Watch, which heads a coalition of 37 human rights organizations that campaigned for the U.S. and European Union to defeat Libya's candidacy, said that "by electing serial human rights violators, the U.N. violates its own criteria as well as common sense."

Bit of an agenda much? ;)

And we're one of the biggest human rights abusers in the world.

It is almost like they don't care what we think any more.

UNITED NATIONS — There was a little the American ambassador here, Susan Rice, could do today to stop the General Assembly from voting Libya and other known rights abusers for a seat on the Human Rights Council, but instead of expressing outrage, she chose to praise the United Nations’s least praiseworthy body.

Ms. Rice couldn’t even bring herself to condemn Libya’s specific human rights record or even tell reporters how America voted in the General Assembly, where 155 of the 192 members deemed the Colonel Gadhafi tyranny fit to sit in judgment of other countries’ human rights record.

The game, it turns out, was rigged, 14 countries having run for 14 available seats on the 47-member Geneva-based rights body. They were all pre-selected by regional groups, some of which include a plurality of countries that care little about human rights violations within their own borders. For countries that do, there was little recourse other than voting against the most flagrant violators and publicizing their opposition.

“As you know, having covered this institution for a while, the United States doesn’t reveal for whom we vote,” Ms. Rice told a reporter who asked about how she had voted on Libya and other rights violators like Mauritania, Angola, Qatar, Thailand, and Malaysia, who secured their new council seats. “I’m not going to sit here and name names,” Ms. Rice said.

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/us-envoy-praises-un-council-on-human-rights-as/86956/