Free Republic

Remember the Danish "Muhammad cartoons" that set off riots by offended Muslims more than three years ago? The debate pitted freedom of press and speech against notions of freedom from insult of one's religion. It rages still – but now in a forum with international legal implications. For years, Islamic nations have succeeded in passing "blasphemy" resolutions at the United Nations (in the General Assembly and in its human rights body). The measures call on states to limit religiously offensive language or speech. No one wants their beliefs ridiculed, but the freedom to disagree over faith is what allows for...

And the pig sitting as "president" of the Council would not even use the name "Israel" in response. Disgusting.

he UN’s Human Rights Council, friend to Islamists and tyrants everywhere n December 2006, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an international group established in 1971 and representing 57 countries, hosted an emergency summit in Mecca. The event became infamous after two angry imams from Denmark presented a dossier of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that mocked the Prophet Mohammed. In the ensuing uproar, Muslims murdered several people in Europe and torched the Danish embassy in Beirut. But the cartoon episode wasn’t the summit’s starkest example of Muslim outrage over free speech. The most critical decision that...

In advance of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States on Monday, President Obama unveiled a new strategy for throwing Israel to the wolves. It takes the form of enthusiasm for the United Nations and international interlopers of all kinds. Instead of ensuring strong American control over the course of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations or the Arab-Israeli peace process, the Obama administration is busy inserting an international mob between the U.S. and Israel. The thinking goes: If Israel doesn’t fall into an American line, Obama will step out of the way, claim his hands are tied, and let the...

The United States has been elected to a seat on the UN Human Rights Council for the first time. The council had been shunned by the Bush administration, which accused it of admitting states with poor rights records and having an anti-Israel bias. But the Obama administration has reversed its predecessor's policy of boycotting the Geneva-based body. The US was one of 18 countries elected to the 47-seat council in a vote by the UN General Assembly. It received 167 votes, far more than the 97 votes needed in the secret ballot. The Obama administration announced in March that it...

It's President Obama's worst bailout so far. He's going to rescue the U.N. Human Rights Council. Now admittedly, the council wasn't on the verge of going out of business. Heck, if there were a nuclear war, the pinstriped thugs of the United Nations' "human rights" bureaucracy would probably be all that's left to keep the cockroaches company. But although the effete goons of the UNHRC aren't going bankrupt, Obama has bailed them out in another way. He's given the repugnant cabal that dominates the council a fresh injection of political capital. President Bush refused to cooperate with the agency, and...

US ambassador to United Nations says Washington's bid to rejoin human rights council meant to stop its 'obsession' with Israel; adds Durban II statement still problematic WASHINGTON – US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said that the new US administration wants to rejoin the sometimes troubled UN Human Rights Council, to – among other things – "battle the anti-Israel crap." In an interview with Politico website, Rice discussed US President Barack Obama's decision to have the US become a part of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) once again, saying the move is meant to change the council's...

The UN Human Rights Council might well be the most vile of all the world body's panels. So why does the Obama administration want in? UN Ambassador Susan Rice announced this week that the United States will seek a seat on the 47-member body -- which is dominated by such human-rights exemplars as China, Cuba, Egypt, Russia and Saudi Arabia -- when elections are held next month. "We do not see any inherent benefit, as demonstrated by recent history, in being outside the tent and simply being critical without having significant influence," Rice said. Well, sure: The Bush administration's disapproval...

UNITED NATIONS, March 31 -- The Obama administration decided Tuesday to seek a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, reversing a decision by the Bush administration to shun the United Nations' premier rights body to protest the influence of repressive states. The United States announced it would participate in elections in May for one of three seats on the 47-member council, joining a slate that includes Belgium, Norway and New Zealand. New Zealand has offered to step aside to allow the United States to run unchallenged, according to a U.S. official. Human rights activists have been advocating U.S. membership...

I have no doubt that the just passed resolution by the United Nation Human Rights Council curtailing freedom of speech about religion, specifically Islam, will soon be applied to silence the voices of courage. Those who fearlessly speak up against the hatred, against the trampling of women's rights, against the murder of infidels, against the murder of Muslim by Muslim, against the terror perpetrated while fervently screaming Allah-o-Akhbar - Allah is Great soon will not be able to let their voices be heard. Such actions have just been declared criminal! I have no doubt that when bloggers like me, will...

Pak bid to criminalise 'defamation of Islam' Saturday, 14 March , 2009, 19:36 Last Updated: Saturday, 14 March , 2009, 19:40 Geneva: UN Watch, a human rights monitoring organization based in Geneva, denounced a new UN resolution circulated on Wednesday by Islamic states that would define any questioning of Islamic dogma as a human rights violation, intimidate dissenting voices, and encourage the forced imposition of Sharia law. UN Watch obtained a copy of the Pakistani-authored proposal after it was distributed among Geneva diplomats attending the current session of the UN Human Rights Council. Entitled “Combating defamation of religions,” it mentions...

.... as abortion rights go international, so does the anti-abortion backlash. The globalization of the abortion wars creates some of the same tensions—between universal human rights and community mores, between majority rule and the protection of individual liberty—as Roe v. Wade, on a larger scale. All over the world, in countries including Kenya, Poland, and Nicaragua, local anti-abortion movements (often working with American allies) rail against the meddling of powerful outsiders. In Poland, traditionalists who oppose abortion bemoan the loss of their country's Catholic values as it integrates into secular Europe. They speak about international human rights and the courts...

The U.N. human rights chief on Thursday warmly welcomed President Barack Obama's decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center and called on the new U.S. administration to follow up by reviewing its approach to detaining people in other countries, including Afghanistan and Iraq. Navi Pillay also called for a thorough investigation into allegations of torture at the Guantanamo center in Cuba and said detainees who were innocent or arbitrarily detained should be adequately compensated "for the six or seven years of their lives that have been lost." .... Calling for a thorough investigation into allegations of torture at Guantanamo,...

Harper's strong stand January 14, 2009 On Monday, Canada stood alone at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in opposing a motion that would have condemned Israel -- and not Hamas -- for the current Gaza conflict. Thirty-three nations voted for the resolution, 13 nations, mostly Western, abstained. Only one nation-- Canada--had the courage to vote "nay." This prompted the Toronto Star to insist "the Stephen Harper government has abandoned a more even-handed approach to the Middle East in favour of unalloyed support of Israel." It's true the Harper government has been a staunch ally of Israel these past...

In Zimbabwe, these days, if you do not die from the cholera you may just find a swifter death. But in spite of the former “breadbasket of Africa” having become the poorest nation in the world with a four digit inflation index, in spite of brutal repression, blatant human rights violations, murder, and rape the United Nation’s infamous Human Rights Council is obsessed with Israel and its right to defend itself against terror… With thousands of people dying of cholera (because hospitals are bankrupt and have no supplies) with no relief in sight, with no sign from Mugabe that he...

Contempt for the United Nations' professed values and institutions is no barrier to diplomatic grandeur at the organization's Turtle Bay headquarters. Quite the opposite, in fact. An increasing number of UN member states scorn its founding documents - the Charter, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. These states, dubbed the ‘The Abusers Club' by human rights activists, are drawn mainly from the developing, Arab, and Islamic worlds. They are co-ordinating their assault on human rights and political freedoms with increasing, and disturbing, success, say UN sources. Certainly the Abusers Club has hijacked the new Geneva-based Human Rights...

Jihad Against Freedom of Speech at the United NationsBy Jeffrey Imm The United Nations' Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has no problem with its members suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job" perpetrated by the United States on itself. The human rights of America's 9/11 victims are not a priority for UNHRC's Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, who engages in 9/11 conspiracy propaganda, while working for an organization headquartered in New York City funded by U.S. tax dollars. This is Richard Falk's protected freedom of speech. Denying the role of Jihadists in...

GENEVA (Reuters) - A special U.N. human rights investigator will visit the United States this month to probe racism, an issue that has forced its way into the race to secure the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. The United Nations said Doudou Diene would meet federal and local officials, as well as lawmakers and judicial authorities during the May 19-June 6 visit. "The special rapporteur will...gather first-hand information on issues related to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance," a U.N. statement said on Friday. His three-week visit, at U.S. government invitation, will cover eight cities -- Washington D.C., New York,...

A new U.N. Human Rights Council official assigned to monitor Israel is calling for an official commission to study the role neoconservatives may have played in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Climate change is now officially a human rights issue, as the UN Human Rights Council on Friday passed a resolution on the subject, recognising that the world's poor are particularly vulnerable. The council also gave the green light for a study into the impact of climate change on human rights, describing climate change as a "global problem .. that requires a global solution". The resolution, submitted by the Maldives and passed without a vote, also noted that the poor tend to have limited resources to cope with the impact of global warming. The country's Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid told AFP...

To the sound of cheers, and by an overhwelming majority of 40 out of 47 votes, the UN Human Rights Council today elected Jean Ziegler, the co-founder of the "Muammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize," as an expert advisor representing the Western world. And for its new Palestine expert, the council chose Richard Falk, who, like Ziegler, accuses the U.S. of being responsible for many of the world's ills and describes Israel in Nazi terminology. "Even within the benighted UN Human Rights council, today was a dark day for human rights," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based...

The United Nations Human Rights Council held a moment of silence Tuesday for martyrs in Gaza killed in an Israel Defense Forces offensive in the Strip, after a request by Iran's foreign minister. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called for the gesture on behalf of the women and children who are "nowadays under attack by the Zionist regime," the term Iranian officials use for Israel because they do not recognize its right to exist. "I would like ... to request one minute silence and ask my Muslim brothers and sisters to read the Fatah for those martyrs in Gaza," he...

HYPOCRISY, the popular 19th-century American journalist and satirist Ambrose Bierce once observed, could be defined as "prejudice with a halo." As false halos go, there are few bigger – or shinier, in that cheap, glittery way – than the one now swaying precariously over the United Nations’ so-called Human Rights Council. Since the council was formed as part of former secretary-general Kofi Annan’s "UN reform" a few years back, the world’s supposed watchdog for violations of human rights has been able to officially condemn just one country for abuses of those rights: Israel. If that sounds familiar – you’re right,...

Today, Governor Mitt Romney called for the US to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council. According to the AP: "The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late," Romney said in response to a question at a pancake house along the coast of early voting South Carolina. "We should withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council." Turns out that we don’t actually have a seat on the Human Rights Council though: Actually, the United States doesn’t have a seat on the human rights council, which it has been boycotting. With that kind of knowledge, Romney may...

UNITED NATIONS: The United States would cut off funding to the U.N. Human Rights Council under a bill passed by the Senate, the latest action by Washington to target an agency it has harshly criticized since its creation last year. Late Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a foreign operations appropriations bill for 2008 with an amendment stating that none of the U.S. contributions to the United Nations would be made available to the council. The House passed an appropriations bill with a similar amendment in June. The council was created in March 2006 to replace the widely discredited and highly...

At its recent June 2007 session, the UN Human Rights Council concluded its lengthy reform process by voting, first, to drop Belarus and Cuba from its blacklist. New restrictions were imposed on the independent experts who report on country violations. The ability to introduce resolutions that name abusers was curbed. And Israel was singled out for permanent indictment—the sole country targeted by a special agenda item, and the sole country subjected to an investigation that examines only one side, is immune from review, and presumes guilt in advance. The five-minute video below offers a glimpse into how the UN's highest...

US House bars funding for UN rights council Fri Jun 22, 11:35 AM ET The US House of Representatives moved to prohibit US funding of the UN Human Rights Council, derided by one member as a "poisonous talk shop," as part of a mammoth funding bill passed early Friday. The United States has repeatedly expressed frustration with the council over its rules, targets for monitoring -- including US ally Israel -- and the way it conducts business. The amendment, to a measure funding the State Department and US diplomacy, passed by unanimous voice vote, and prevents US funding for the...

Castro and Lukashenko to Celebrate Human Rights Council Reform Package Dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus will be celebrating the UN Human Rights Council's likely adoption tomorrow of a reform package that will see both regimes dropped from a blacklist, while Israel is placed under permanent indictment. Contrary to all the promises of reform issued last year, the proposal released today by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba targets Israel for permanent indictment under a special agenda item: "Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories," which includes "Human rights violations and implications of...

UNITED NATIONS - A wide-ranging study of the UN Human Rights Council says Canada is the most active advocate for the world's human rights victims, but democracies could still do far more to challenge the council's near-domination by human rights abuser states. In Dawn of a New Era,? its 44- page review of the council's first year, UN Watch says political expediency has led to a situation where "too many democracies have gone along with the spoilers." The Geneva-based watchdog wants democracies to "unite and redouble their efforts" to turn the council into a credible global monitor of human rights...

Let's say this sissy quarrel would result in an all out millitary confrontation between Sweden and Cuba. What to expect? Sweden would probably win round 1 and some following ones as the Cubans would be busy not being busy and therefore being easy targets for weapons like these (stealth battle ships, AIP submarines, COMBINED multirole Air-to-Air/Air-to-Surface/Reconnaissance fighter planes, not to mention the mass fabricated Swedish 'Carl Gustav' bazooka's used on a large scale in Iraq and so on): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3724219.stm http://www.kockums.se/Submarines/gotland.html http://www.gripen.com/en/index.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_recoilless_rifle http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkQnix42gNw&NR On the other hand, Cubans enjoy the best health care on earth so they'll win the last...

GENEVA (Reuters) - United Nations chief Kofi Annan demanded on Tuesday that the world body's human rights watchdog, meeting in special session on Sudan's Darfur, send a clear message that the "nightmare" of violence there had to stop. "The people in Darfur cannot afford to wait another day. The violence must stop. The killings and other gross violations of human rights must end," Annan said in a statement to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. The Council, launched last June in a plan to make the U.N. more effective, must decide on what kind of mission of inquiry to send to...

UNITED NATIONS - The United States sharply criticized the new U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday, calling it a "disappointment" and saying it has failed to address serious violations in its first few months of operation — particularly in Sudan's Darfur region. Sudan responded with a harsh condemnation of the U.S. human rights record and said Washington had no right to judge the effectiveness of the U.N. agency. The barbs came during the Human Rights Council's first annual report to the General Assembly. The U.S. is not a member of the council, which was created earlier this year to replace...

After its shift on Iran, India on Thursday registered yet another alteration in its West Asia policy. It joined 29 countries to vote in favour of a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva that demands an end to Israeli military action in Gaza and asks for the release of detained Palestinian ministers and leaders. A special session of the UNHRC also decided to send a fact-finding mission urgently to the Palestinian areas to assess the ground situation. The resolution on the human rights situation in Gaza expressed "grave concern at the detrimental impact of the...

<p>New York: Deputy Secretary-General of the U.N. was on Wednesday night accused of making ``a very, very grave mistake'' after calling the Bush administration hypocrites who were feeding a right-wing anti-U.N. frenzy in middle America.</p> <p>Washington's Ambassador to the U.N. responded with undisguised fury to a speech by Mark Malloch Brown, the Deputy Secretary-General, in which he accused Washington of using the international body ``almost by stealth as a diplomatic tool'' while failing to defend it at home.</p>

Cuba, Saudis, China on Rights Council UNITED NATIONS, May. 10, 2006 (AP) (AP) Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Russia won seats on the new U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday despite their poor human rights records, but two rights abusers _ Iran and Venezuela _ were defeated. Human rights groups said they were generally pleased with the 47 members elected to the council, which will replace the highly politicized Human Rights Commission. It was discredited in recent years because some countries with terrible rights records used their membership to protect one another from condemnation. "The spoiler governments, the governments that have...

FIVE nations seen by rights groups as among the world's worst abusers have been elected along with 39 other countries to the United Nations' new Human Rights Council in a first round of voting. Russia, China, Cuba, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, identified by New York-based Human Rights Watch as unworthy of membership on the new UN body, were among those winning seats. But two others on the group's list, Iran and Azerbaijan, failed to win membership on the first ballot. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth said it was inevitable some rights foes would win seats but "the important...

By Ryan Jones Almost completely disregarding Palestinian Arab aggression against Israel's Jews, a United Nations envoy has sought to lay the blame for regional conflict at the doorstep of the Jewish state by misrepresenting and exaggerating Israel's defensive measures and isolated acts of frustration. In a special report prepared for next week's annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission, South African lawyer John Dugard charged: "It seems that settlers are able to terrorize Palestinians and destroy their trees and crops with impunity." What he failed to mention, however, are the innumerable stoning, shooting and bombing attacks carried out against...

A new report from the UN Commission on Human Rights concludes by calling on the United States to close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay “without further delay.”[1] The report, issued by a body that counts Sudan, Cuba, China and Zimbabwe as current members, alleges torture at the Guantanamo facility, and demands that “all persons found to have perpetrated, ordered, tolerated or condoned such practices, up to the highest level of military and political command,” presumably including the U.S. President and the Secretary of Defense, be “brought to justice.”[2] These demands, however, are groundless. None of the report’s authors toured...

The White House has savaged a UN report demanding the immediate closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp calling it "a discredit to the UN". White House spokesman Scott McClellan said investigators failed to examine the facts and that their time would be better spent studying other cases. The report says the US should try all approximately 500 inmates, or free them "without further delay". Aspects of the treatment at the camp amount to torture, the UN team alleges. In response, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that "sooner or later" the camp will have to close, but added that...

GENEVA -- The United States must close its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay because it is effectively a torture camp where prisoners have no access to justice, a U.N. report released Thursday concluded. The White House rejected the recommendation. The 54-page report summarizing an investigation by five U.N. experts accused the United States of practices that "amount to torture" and demanded detainees be allowed a fair trial or freed. The investigators did not visit the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "Those people should be released or brought before an independent court," Manfred Nowak, the U.N. investigator for torture, told...

Last week, I reported on the move by China and its authoritarian-minded cohorts in the General Assembly to stop UN staffers from talking to the press without their approval about matters under investigation that might impact the "reputation" of the United Nations. While that is certainly bad enough if you believe in freedom of the press, it is nothing compared to what the Islamic fanatics are trying to ban--and using the United Nations to do it

A United Nations inquiry has called for the immediate closure of America's Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the prosecution of officers and politicians "up to the highest level" who are accused of torturing detainees. The UN Human Rights Commission report, due to be published this week, concludes that Washington should put the 520 detainees on trial or release them. It calls for the United States to halt all "practices amounting to torture", including the force-feeding of inmates who go on hunger strike. The report wants the Bush administration to ensure that all allegations of torture are investigated by US criminal...

Earlier this month the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, chafing over a U.S. plan to salvage the discredited Human Rights Commission, exemplified why the very idea of U.N. reform looks more and more like a gothic fantasy. The ambassador was indignant at the notion that states under U.N. sanction for rights abuses should be kept off a newly created Human Rights Council. "The presumption that a country is a violator of human rights is very subjective," complained Munir Akram. "If you want to create criteria...that exclude certain countries, why not those that don't support trade liberalization or that don't...

United Nations Ambassador John Bolton is famously impatient about fixing the joint. He's got a list of proposals, about 750 of them. But right at the top is one that should be easy: Overhauling the U.N. Human Rights Commission. This is the commission that is supposed to promote and protect human rights around the world. Instead, it has turned into an international punch line. It's the panel that, in a breathtaking 2003 pratfall, elected Libya to its chairmanship. Libya ranked among the most repressive countries on the planet, among such execrable company as North Korea and Sudan. So much for...

TEHRAN, Dec. 31 (MNA) -- Some Iranian non-governmental organizations (NGO) have presented the United Nations Human Rights Commission an unrealistic picture of Iran regarding violence against women, a member of the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee said on Saturday. Speaking to the Fars News Agency, Elham Aminzadeh stated that the person who planned and arranged the reports for the UN Commission did not act fairly in selecting the NGOs. The UN Human Rights Commission rapporteur visited Iran to make a report about violence against women from January 29 to February 6, 2005, and visited various institutions, she added....

BEIJING (AFP) - The UN's chief torture investigator has praised China's leaders for acknowledging the widespread abuse of prisoners in the nation's jails, as he begins a historic 12-day fact-finding mission. Manfred Novak, the UN Human Rights Commission's special rapporteur on torture, said Beijing had offered him freer access to detainees than the United States was prepared to give him on a recently scrapped trip to Guantanamo Bay. "There is a growing awareness that torture is quite widely practised in the common criminal proceedings (in China) by the police and that something needs to be done," Nowak said in an...

UNITED NATIONS, Sept 15 (Reuters) - Terrorism is the main threat to human rights and development and the U.N. Security Council must be at the center of global efforts to fight it, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday. But governments alone are not enough to counter the threat, he told a world summit examining the future of the United Nations on its 60th anniversary. Religious and civic groups as well as the media, cultural and humanitarian organizations must all play a role, he said. From its creation, despite many heated discussions and bitter disagreements, the United Nations has symbolized...

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - U.N. human rights experts have begun an investigation into U.S. detention facilities for terrorist suspects and allegations that there are secret prisons, one of the project leaders said Wednesday. Manfred Nowak, the U.N.'s special expert on torture, said some undeclared holding areas could include U.S. Navy ships in international waters. He said there were "serious" allegations to that effect from Amnesty International and other non-governmental human rights groups. "I have heard these rumors and we have to follow them up," he told The Associated Press, urging Washington to cooperate with the investigation. Officials at the U.S....

"No institution offers more dreary evidence of a United Nations in crisis than its Commission on Human Rights. Each year delegates from 53 member states meet to name the worst offending countries and pass resolutions condemning their abuses. Instead, the Commission has become a sanctuary for rogue regimes eager to divert attention from their repressive policies. The emperor has no clothes, but UN leaders simply avert their eyes. The United Nations prides itself on its ethos of universalism: It is a body with no standards for membership—and no penalties for betraying its highest ideals. It gives equal voice to dictatorships...

As if the United Nations' reputation had not suffered enough from self-inflicted wounds, its Human Rights Commission has rubbed in more salt. It has re-elected Zimbabwe, one of the world's most notorious human rights violators, as a member. President Robert Mugabe has evicted white farmers from their land, harassed his political opponents, shut down independent news media and presided over fraudulent elections. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has accurately described his nation as "an outpost of tyranny." But the U.N. has helped to legitimize the treacherous Mugabe regime. Why expect anything else? Libya is a member of the Human Rights...