What...Another UN Travesty?

It seems the latest incarnation of the United Nations Human Rights Council has been elected as of yesterday.  Fittingly enough, since that very day has been declared Human Rights Day.  To some people the issue of human rights is critical; those espousing its value would, of necessity, represent those who are staunch supporters of human rights, whose societies exemplify human rights in action, respecting all people equally and offering all equal status and opportunities under the law.

There are some countries where to elect them to the Council would represent an absolute and utter travesty.  Countries, say, like Venezuela, Cuba, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Mali, Syria - oh, scratch that - suffice it to claim any Arab/Muslim country of the Middle East.  Amazingly, Israel has never been elected to sit on the Council.  But this year, just yesterday, among other countries, Mauritania was elected to the UN Human Rights Council.

But then, what do we expect of a UN group?  UNESCO has not yet responded to calls to remove Syria from its human rights committee.  Libya has sat on the Human Rights Council, oh and Burma, that bastion of human rights protection, and let's see, North Korea, Guinea, nuclear-threat-loving Iran and Tamil-butchering Sri Lanka.  Mind, Poland was also elected to the Council as the 2013 president of the United Nations Human Rights Council, with Remigiusz Henczal of Poland pledging to help promote human rights in a "fair and equal manner".

He will no doubt do an excellent job.  And the four vice-presidents known as the Council's Bureau are represented by  Cheikh Ahmed Ould Zahaf of Mauritania, Iruthisham Adam of the Maldives, Luis Gallegos Chiriboga of Ecuador and Alexandre Fasel of Switzerland.  An illustrious crew, no doubt about it, to head the 47-member Geneva-based body, the UN's foremost inter-governmental institution to promote and protect global human rights.

 "It is obscene for the UN to use the occasion of Human Rights Day, when we commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to elect the world's worst enabler of slavery to this prestigious post.  The UN is making an arsonist head of the fire department", declared Hillel Neuer UN Watch executive director indignantly.  Not incredulously, surely not, for Mr. Neuer as a UN-watcher extraordinaire has seen this screenplay before.

A recent report by the British paper The Guardian, points out that "up to 800,000 people in a nation of 3.5 million remain chattels".  Lighter-skinned Moors are infused with power and this is where the country's wealth is also concentrated.  "Leaving slave-descended darker-skinned Moors and black Africans on the edges of society", so as proponents of human rights, Mauritania clearly has much to offer the world in teaching and encouraging the practise of human rights.

Or the avoidance thereof.