How hard was it for the 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly to vote in favor of Thursday’s resolution condemning human rights violations in Syria? The violations are obvious, and horrific. Since last March, Syria’s regime under dictator Bashar al-Assad has been trying to exterminate open dissent by jailing, torturing, shooting and shelling its own citizenry. With the Syrian government using heavy weapons against its own people, the death toll is now estimated at roughly 7,000.
If any of the UN’s member states had hesitations over the details of the resolution, which calls for Assad to make way for a peaceful transition to a democratic and pluralistic system, they could comfort themselves that General Assembly resolutions are nonbinding.
The resolution passed, by a vote of 137 to 12, with 17 abstentions (and the remaining 27 presumably out to lunch). By standards of the UN General Assembly, that’s a triumph. But it still means that with Syria’s totalitarian regime trying to keep its dynastic grip on power by murdering its own people by the thousands, 29% of the members of the UN General Assembly could not bring themselves to condemn the process.
That’s quite bad enough. But then there are the dozen states that didn’t just abstain, or duck out of the room, but actively voted against the resolution. The UN, as far as I can discover, has not yet gotten around to posting the voting record. But the BBC has done us the favor of providing a roster. One of those states is Syria itself, which is represented at the UN by the same regime that is butchering its own people — and among its international depredations boasts a horrendous record of terrorist bombings and other variations on murder in Lebanon and Iraq, and support for terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, in Gaza and Lebanon.
Here’s the full dirty dozen, on this voting roll of dishonor:
Belarus
Bolivia
China
Cuba
Ecuador
Iran
Nicaragua
North Korea
Russia
Syria
Venezuela
Zimbabwe
This is not by any stretch the sum total of repressive regimes that enjoy seats at the UN.
-more at link-
Meanwhile, the UN Is Planning Your Future — All of It
February 13, 2012 - 2:21 am - by Claudia Rosett
The United Nations hasn’t stopped the carnage in Syria, hasn’t stopped Iran’s race for nuclear weapons, and so far hasn’t even managed to produce financial disclosure forms for its top officials that actually disclose anything about their finances. (For instance, here’s the UN “disclosure” form for the head of the UN Environment Program,Achim Steiner.)
But that’s no bar to the UN proposing to plan the future of the planet. While the headlines focus on upheaval in the Middle East, financial crisis in Europe, and election year politics in the U.S., the UN has been planning its grand summit-level Rio+20 Conference, scheduled for June 20-22 in Brazil. This will mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit, which helped spade the ground for climate hysteria, the Kyoto treaty, and the quack vilification of the world’s most productive economies. This round, the UN plans to make even more “sustainable” the things the UN-ocracy would like to see sustained — paramount among them, the UN itself.
As is the way of such UN confabs, the Rio+20 Conference already has a “Dedicated Secretariat,” headed by China’s Sha Zukang, the UN Under-Secretary-General who made news in 2010 for his drunken rant during a UN retreat at an Austrian ski resort — in which Sha declared he had never liked UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, and he didn’t like Americans either. Also in 2010, Sha served as ceremonial presenter of a “World Harmony Award” to the former Chinese military chief who was operational commander during the 1989 crushing of the Tiananmen Square uprising.
-this is a repeat, more at link-
No comments:
Post a Comment