Walk Away From The U.N.

The Australian — Opinion

So much for representing freedom and human rights
June 22, 2007

Anne Bayefsky, editor of website Eye on the UN, writing in The Wall Street Journal on the hopeless United Nations

WHAT is it about standing up for human rights that the UN finds so difficult?

A year ago, then secretary-general Kofi Annan dissolved the UN Commission on Human Rights under pressure after the commission discredited itself repeatedly, even electing a Libyan chairman. Now its successor, the UN Human Rights Council, is proving itself to be worse than what it replaced.

This week the council marked its first anniversary in Geneva by adopting an agenda that is an affront to the civilised world. It deletes the job of investigating human rights violations in the brutal dictatorships of Belarus and Cuba and instead focuses its attention uniquely on Israel.

The UN General Assembly created the council without specifying membership criteria, such as, say, respecting human rights. The council now includes the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Qatar, Russia and Saudi Arabia. Less than half of its members, using the Freedom House's yardstick, are fully free democracies. And after a successful takeover bid of regional blocs within the council, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference dominates it.

The result is a decimation of a human rights system created over decades, with a new, intense focus on Israel. Israel has been the subject of three special sessions, has been singled out in 75 per cent of the council's state-specific resolutions and will continue to be routinely condemned until council members decide "the occupation" is over, an occupation many members believe began with Israel's creation.

William Pfaff, in the International Herald Tribune, on Europe's new leaders:
MANY in Washington are under the impression that with Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France, Angela Merkel as Germany's chancellor, a presumably Atlantist Gordon Brown succeeding Tony Blair in Britain, the Kaczynski brothers in Warsaw, weakened left-wing governments in Spain and Italy, and a strengthened conservative government in Belgium, happy days are here again. This rests to a considerable extent on the false assumption that personalities and sentiment, not interests (as they are perceived by governments and public), govern foreign policies ... The phrase war against terror means nothing, is not a policy or a strategy and distorts the understanding of the war going on between certain forces of Islamic revival, reactionary reform and politico-cultural retaliation, and the US and its dwindling band of allies (among whom Poland's Kaczynski brothers will be the last of those truly committed, after Blair is gone from politics at the end of June).

The western Europeans mostly think the US continues to do far more harm than good in the Middle East and Africa; and they are very dubious about provoking Russia and about what is going on in Afghanistan, preferring to be as little involved in the latter affair as possible. Their new leaders, I am afraid, are going to be a great disappointment to the global adventurers in Washington, just as were their predecessors, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder.

Susan Tomes, in The Guardian in Britain, on how an Australian High Court judgment could affect musicians and the arts:
MUSIC critics must be trembling after reading that the owners of an Australian restaurant have won a court case against a newspaper (The Sydney Morning Herald) that gave it a bad review. The owners claimed their business interests had been damaged. A few months ago a Belfast restaurateur won damages of pound stg. 25,000 for defamation after a negative review.

What if the combative attitude of these restaurant owners were to spread to the arts? Reviews of individual restaurants are relatively infrequent, but artists and performers, particularly in the music world, are reviewed in every big city they visit. Could they sue?

Restaurants and their reputations are a very different matter from artists and theirs. If your restaurant is criticised, you can fire the chef, get a new team in the kitchen, change the front-of-house staff and within a short time turn it into a new establishment.

The situation is much more serious for an artist. If someone does a hatchet job on a solo pianist, their personal reputation and business interests are damaged.

The pianist is the business. Their playing cannot be spruced up overnight. If they could prove that bookings had fallen through or were likely to because concert promoters had lost confidence in them after reading a negative review, surely they could sue for damage to their business interests.

The future Hitlers of this world are emboldened by lack of leadership in the UN. They see the panty-wastes that run the organization for the weaklings that they are and will do everything in their power to exploit them at every opportunity. Because, no one steps up and calls these maniacs to task, they continue to continue. I vote NO CONFIDENCE.