A Failed World Community

The International Criminal Court, after ten years of existence as a handmaid of the United Nations and thus representing a judicial court of review capable of mounting a full and legal court case against what it deems to be war criminals on a grand scale inclusive of genocide, has brought news of yet another verdict. This one holding responsible and convicting on the evidence Thomas Lubanga Dyilo of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The International Criminal Court has a list of those whom it wishes to prosecute in the name of universal human rights. The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir was tried and convicted on ten counts of human rights abuses, including genocide. His conviction was one reached at a remove, in absentia. Although there is a warrant out globally for his arrest, he laughs at the very notion of his being taken into custody.

Laughing alongside him is the Arab League and all their members, along with other leaders of Muslim countries who will have no truck with the International Criminal Court. Unless, of course, or until it suits their purpose to do so. Moammar Gadhafi, once the Arab League reached the conclusion he was of no further use and sick of his gadfly antics, abandoned him. Bashar al-Assad is next in line.

Another member-creature of the United Nations, a close sister in fact to the International Criminal Court is the UN's Human Rights Commission, and it too is a busy place, for it has been tasked with a grave and extremely important effort; to identify and to document and to condemn human-rights-abusing nations, to shame them, name them and hasten their shame-faced turnabout to respectable, human-rights-abiding places.

This year's UNHRC debate heard from the Syrian ambassador who informed the chamber that behind the unabated violence in his country was none other than Israel. And that, of course, figures since Israel remains the sole state continually roundly condemned by members of the UNHRC committee for its flagrant human rights abuses even as it represents a standard of respect for human rights that most members of the committee could never match.

Delegates at the UNHRC debate from Cuba, Syria, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and a few other sterling examples of rights-respecting states praised the exemplary human rights record of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the greatest number of executions in the world were carried out in the last year. Bringing to justice in Iran criminals such as homosexuals, regime dissenters and Baha'i.

There was an alternate, matching summit focusing on human rights that took place in Geneva as well, organized by the independent UN Watch, along with a group of 20 other human-rights groups. Speakers were Chinese dissidents, state prisoners from North Korea, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Burma. Along with democracy campaigners from Vietnam, Tibet, Pakistan and elsewhere in this troubled world.

The final session heard a speech by Maikel Nabil, an Egyptian veterinary student held for 301 days in a Cairo prison for the crime of recommending the Egyptian military cede power to a civil, elected body. He posted on his blog further recommendations; that Egyptian society treat women, gays and Jews with respect.

Another speech by Ebrahim Mehtari who was imprisoned, raped tortured and left for dead for opposing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 2009 presidential victory.

And then there was also Hadeel Kouki, a university student in Aleppo, Syria. Her unforgivably shocking crime meriting imprisonment, electric shocks and repeat rapes was to have attempted to smuggle medical supplies to children injured by the regime's bombardments against its detractors.

At that UN Watch summit, Hadeel Kouki was anxious that all the delegates know the name of the guard who had chiefly raped her: Abdul Hakeem Abdullatif. He will, without doubt, become at some future date, a proud representative of Syria to the UN's Human Rights Council.