Tainted by Deliberate Association

The Government of Canada made a decision that it would no longer play the hypocritical games that the United Nations is so pitifully famous for under the majority leadership of countries who ally themselves alongside the powerfully convincing alliances between countries with clout and those that are majority Muslim and have a stranglehold on the world's output of petroleum-based energy sources.

They, and their support from Asian, African and Latin American countries who have veered sharply to the left, find it useful to use their majority strength in the world body to isolate, slander and issue sententious condemnations as a human-rights abuser a sole target, the State of Israel. Their appeal to those who support their sanctimony is the strength of their generosity as a supplier of oil to those they favour.

After the original Durban Declaration issued in 2001 out of Durban, South Africa, with its free-for-all on Israel, highlighting out of 192 UN member countries only Israel with a charge of racism, the Conservative-led Canadian Government made it known it had no intention whatever of lending itself to any such further travesties by formally attending Durban succession conferences.

But that was not the reaction of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, a government-sponsored group in Ottawa more familiarly called Rights and Democracy whose presence and agenda came to light when an internal controversy arose with the introduction of new members of its board of directors who charged its president Remy Beauregard, with unauthorized and questionable support of anti-Israel groups.

After a heated board meeting that took place in January 2010, Mr. Beauregard suffered a heart attack and died. The four-year background of relations with the R&D staff, its board of directors, cliques, accusations and counter-accusations became fodder for sensational news coverage, with new directors on its board being as good as accused of having hounded Mr. Beauregard to an early death.

Staff firings, board resignations and a host of dysfunctional events related to the working of the human rights advocacy group came to the fore. There was nothing in its activities to denounce it for having forsaken its moral and neutral mandate, grimly claimed its supporters. Journalist Terry Glavin recently revealed an interesting set of statements that took place during a hearing of the standing committee on foreign affairs back in October of 2009.

Conservative MP James Lunney, questioning R&D president Beauregard:
Lunney: "Did Rights and Democracy play any role, directly or indirectly, in planning for or participating in the conference in Durban?"
Beauregard: "No, we did not."

Another verbal joust between NDP MP Paul Dewar and Mr. Beauregard's successor, Gerard Latulippe, in a later hearing of the same committee:
Dewar: "There was this Durban 2 conspiracy. That's a dud, from what you're showing in the document here. I'll say it's a dud. You can say there was nothing there."
Latulippe: "What I did is I'm giving you all the facts."

And then, the experience of a former R&D staffer, directly involved in a senior position with the UN Human Rights Council's Durban preparations panel. An assigned involvement the details of which were released by their representative, the R&D staffer, to the R&D management, in two official reports filed with R&D management from Geneva.

At least seven R&D employees were working in Geneva in 2008 helping to plan the Durban conference, as they were assigned to do, by R&D. R&D spent $140,000 for conference-related business during that time, in Geneva. Paul Dewar claimed that a Deloitte & Touche audit that made no positive identification of how that money was spent served to clear R&D.

(Additionally, former members of the R&D staff have been supportive of Paul Dewar's NDP leadership bid. It is an aside, but not too coincidental that Paul Dewar's bid for the leadership of the NDP appears to have come to a stuttering halt this very day. In the initial morning voting process he came in fifth among contenders, and wisely chose to remove his name from further ballots.)

In the report addressed to R&D management there is a statement: "The Durban Review Conference was a priority for my unit"; the unit assigned to vet and manage NGO participation in the Durban conference which the Government of Canada refused to be a part of in recognition of the malignant forces behind the revisited Durban II and III conferences.

The senior staffer was tasked with the preparation of the agenda and with the drafting of minutes for each meeting of the UN Human Rights Council panel setting the rules and making arrangements for the Durban "civil society" groups in Geneva. His responsibility extended to the management of the NGO panel's correspondence, and to put together the Durban planning newsletters, among other duties.

Canada was officially joined by other Western democratic countries in refusing to once again become embroiled in and lend legitimacy to a hateful attack upon one member-state, as the sole identifiable human-rights abusing country on the Globe. Where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was courteously given the pulpit to excoriate Israel and promise his country would proceed to 'wipe it from the map'.

This is the manner in which Rights and Democracy's mission to help advance universal human rights and democratic development in the world proceeded under the presidency of Remy Beauregard. Whose focus Paul Dewar and most left-leaning unionists, politicians and academics supported and enthusiastically approved of.