UN isn't all its cracked up to be.

[SlyHunter]

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudan won an uncontested election on Tuesday to the United Nations' main human rights watchdog, prompting the United States to walk out because of alleged ethnic cleansing in the country's Darfur region.

A group that would allow Sudan a membership on the Human rights committed. A group that would allow Iraq with President Saddam Hussein to become the chairman of the Disarmament committee. A group that would make Egypt and Syria co chairs in the Human rights committee. Is a group America should not be a part of.

Sudan's delegate immediately shot back that the U.S. delegation was "shedding crocodile tears" and turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Iraq against civilians as well as against prisoners.
http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=859290&tw=wn_wire_story

Someone overlooked the fact that we prosecute our criminals. That unlike allot of others we police our own.


The government of Sudan remained a gross human rights abuser, while rebel groups committed their share of violations. In the seemingly endless seventeen-year civil war, the government stepped up its brutal expulsions of southern villagers from the oil production areas and trumpeted its resolve to use the oil income for more weapons. Under the leadership of President (Lt. Gen.) Omar El Bashir, the government intensified its bombing of civilian targets in the war, denied relief food to needy civilians, and abused children's rights, particularly through its military and logistical support for the Ugandan rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which held an estimated 6,000 Ugandan children captive on government-controlled Sudanese territory. As for the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the principal armed movement of the south and of all Sudan, its forces continued to loot food (including relief provisions) from the population, sometimes with civilian casualties, recruit child soldiers, and commit rape. On both sides, impunity was the rule.

Torture and impunity remained a government policy. Security forces continued a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and persecution targeting political opponents and human rights defenders by means of arbitrary searches and arrests, followed by incommunicado and protracted arbitrary detention without judicial review. Security used "non-detention" as a ploy as in prior years: it ordered individuals to report to security headquarters early in the morning and sit there all day, doing nothing. They were released at night but ordered to return the next day.

Press-gang military recruitment of young men and underage boys from buses and public places continued. Demonstrators in Khartoum and other cities participated in anti-conscription protests that damaged government property and banks. Authorities responded with what appeared to be excessive force, killing several students and unemployed.

Conditions in Omdurman Women's Prison remained shocking: chronic overcrowding, lack of sanitation, diseases, and death from epidemics among children who lived with their mothers. The government annually pardoned women, temporarily easing overcrowding before bringing in the next batch of prisoners; in 2000, the government pardoned more than 700 women. These included more than 500 mostly poverty-stricken, illiterate southerners convicted of brewing and selling alcohol to help their families survive.

Public Order Police frequently harassed women and monitored women's dress according to the government's stereotype of Islamic correctness. Public Order Courts remained the state's primary weapon against women striving for freedom and equality; women received summary justice in these courts, often followed immediately by flogging, without effective right to appeal.

In September 2000, the governor of Khartoum State decreed that women would be banned from some public service jobs such as gas station attendant and restaurant and hotel employee. Security forces tear-gassed and beat women demonstrating against the decree, arresting twenty-six of them for trial by Public Order Courts. Even the government-created unions protested and the court suspended the decree in September pending a judicial hearing.

The nongovernmental press exercised more freedom despite arrests of journalists. In March 2000, security authorities held five journalists and a poet for questioning over articles deemed "anti-government" and critical of the armed forces. In August, security forces arrested two journalists from private newspapers, both of which had been shut down several times in 1999 for accusing the government of corruption.

Even though SPLA leaders promised to stop their troops' looting, the confiscation of relief food from civilians by SPLA soldiers and officers continued. In March 2000, an SPLA commander in Bahr El Ghazal took the entire contents of a relief warehouse, valued at $500,000, according to an investigation carried out by the SPLA's relief arm and international relief agencies. Several looting incidents, at or after relief food distributions, occurred in Eastern Equatoria. When angry civilians on one occasion tried to prevent the SPLA from taking the food, the soldiers fired into the crowd, killing several.

http://www.hrw.org/wr2k1/africa/sudan.html

They allow Sudan in Human rights committee and have the gall to condemn the US or Israel for human rights violations. Get real.

[SlyHunter]

Individual rights are precisely what the UN's declaration is designed to destroy. No, it doesn't openly attack individual rights; that would be rejected outright by freer countries. It destroys rights by internal corruption -- by perverting the meaning of rights into its exact opposite.

The declaration first covers what appear to be legitimate rights, such as "the right to life, liberty and security of person," "the right to own property," and freedom of "thought" and "opinion." (The right to pursue happiness is absent, for reasons that will soon become obvious.) It then introduces a series of "economic rights," such as a person's "right" to work, paid holidays, protection against unemployment, social security, free education, and a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care .

If people are entitled to these, who will be forced to provide them? Whose property will be seized to pay for them?

Such "economic rights" obviously contradict the right to liberty and property. There can be no such thing as a right to violate the rights of others. "Economic rights" merely hand government the power to violate individual rights, thereby rendering the individual a slave to the needs and desires of others. They effectively make communism the social ideal. (This is made explicit in Article 29, which states: "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.")


A tyrannical country such as China or North Korea can claim that it upholds "economic rights," and thereby derive moral sanction. Meanwhile, the United States -- the freest and most prosperous country on earth -- becomes the moral villain for not sufficiently protecting "economic rights," i.e., for not sufficiently sacrificing those individuals who are ambitious, creative and productive to those who are not.
When rights get perverted, so does justice -- and vice versa.

In 1920, Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) party adopted "economic rights" in its platform. And Stalin entrenched them into the Soviet Union's constitution. Doing so establishes the principle that the individual's life belongs to the collective, which, in essence, hands the government the power and the moral sanction to do whatever it wants with that life.

The declaration deserves moral condemnation and rejection. The only human rights are individual rights -- which have made possible the freedom and prosperity that we currently enjoy, but risk losing. Rather than allow political power lusters to destroy the remnants of individual rights that still protect us, we should be eternally vigilant in protecting and restoring our inalienable rights.

http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=210

[blackfox]

Although not directly related to the issue posted, I have never liked the UN...I love the idea, and perhaps in the future it might be reworked to be more effective...but for now, I have these problems:
1) The fact that the UN goes after consensus decision-making, makes the process very slow in its' response to the problems at hand...if there was a dangerous development going on in the world, the time it took to decide on a couse of action, could already make any decision too late to have any real relevance/effectiveness
2) As related to 1), most decisions, to gain consensus are compromise positions which further water-down the potential effectiveness of any action/policy
3) As related to both above, the veto power that the permanent members of the security council enjoy, can often ruin any effective policy decisions in one stroke...
The UN process seems somewhat analgous to the methods employed by a split Congress...arguing down party lines, stonewalling, back-room favors, fillibusters and contention over inconsequential details...at least the Congress is all from one country...The UN includes and must recogognize and appease the concerns of many...I somewhat worry about the EU in this respect, also...
I apologize if I have been somewhat incomplete here, but you get the idea...

[SlyHunter]

Although not directly related to the issue posted, I have never liked the UN...I love the idea, and perhaps in the future it might be reworked to be more effective...but for now, I have these problems:
1) The fact that the UN goes after consensus decision-making, makes the process very slow in its' response to the problems at hand...if there was a dangerous development going on in the world, the time it took to decide on a couse of action, could already make any decision too late to have any real relevance/effectiveness
2) As related to 1), most decisions, to gain consensus are compromise positions which further water-down the potential effectiveness of any action/policy
3) As related to both above, the veto power that the permanent members of the security council enjoy, can often ruin any effective policy decisions in one stroke...
The UN process seems somewhat analgous to the methods employed by a split Congress...arguing down party lines, stonewalling, back-room favors, fillibusters and contention over inconsequential details...at least the Congress is all from one country...The UN includes and must recogognize and appease the concerns of many...I somewhat worry about the EU in this respect, also...
I apologize if I have been somewhat incomplete here, but you get the idea...
I think its because the UN wasn't originally created to be a World Government but simply a forum for the Governments of the world.

I don't think it can be reworked because you have to get past the veto's of, I believe 5 different countries with 5 different philosophy's on life. It would be better to recreate it from scratch even if it meant having two world governments because nobody could agree on just one.

[SlyHunter]

Consider the meaning of the rights commission vote. The UN voted not to reappoint the United States to its seat on the commission ... but in the same vote, it gave a seat to Sudan, a country that tolerates the practice of slavery.

What was the reason for this perverse decision? According to Joanna Weschler, the UN representative of Human Rights Watch, America lost the vote because "there has been a growing resentment toward the United States (because of) votes on key human rights standards, including opposition to a treaty to abolish land mines and to the International Criminal Court, and making AIDS drugs available to everyone." Translation: The complaint against America is that we did not agree to compromise our national defense, our national sovereignty and our property rights. In a similar vein, other diplomats have cited, as contributions to the UN's anti-American "grudge," the Bush administration's pursuit of a national missile defense and its opposition to international global-warming controls, which would require us to shut down American industry.

Yet while we are supposed to subject ourselves to more UN restriction, the Human Rights Commission is doing its best to shield the world's worst dictatorships. As a Reuters report puts it, "the 53-member commission (is) turning into an 'abuser solidarity' group with more and more countries with questionable human rights records gaining election and then voting as a bloc against singling out individual nations for human rights abuses." The commission contains a slew of such "questionable" countries ... from Russia to Indonesia ... whose citizens do not enjoy one-tenth of the legal protections we Americans take for granted. But the real stars on the commission are the outright dictatorships, the folks with fresh blood on their hands: Sudan, Libya, Syria, China, Cuba and Vietnam.

What is the status of an organization dedicated to international peace and "human rights" ... while it harbors the world's worst tyrannies, who use their votes to escape criticism and denounce free nations? Yet this is a description, not just of the Human Rights Commission, but of the UN itself. It is an organization in which dictatorships enjoy equal status with free nations, in which they are empowered to gang together, joined by every second-rate power resentful of American strength, and pass judgment on any assertion of American interests. As Ayn Rand once described it, the UN is like "a crime-fighting committee whose board of directors includes the leading gangsters of the community."

Note, however, the reaction of so-called human rights activists. When Congress threatened to withhold UN dues, these activists urged America instead to increase its support for the UN. On May 10, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Human Rights Law Group, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, and Physicians for Human Rights, among others, joined together to issue an appeal to Congress for greater cooperation with the UN. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch declared: "Instead of writing off the commission, the United States should take the process of multilateral diplomacy more seriously." In other words, if we just appease the UN, maybe they will be a little nicer to us and not quite so nice to Sudan. What an inspiring vision for the future of individual rights.

Those who really care about individual rights ... and who recognize America's role as the world's pre-eminent defender of freedom ... should do much more than issue a few petty threats over UN dues. They should ask whether the United States ought to belong to the United Nations at all.

Yes, America should seek to cooperate with other nations to promote international peace and protect individual rights. But we cannot do so by cooperating with an organization that serves the interests of the aggressors and dictators.


http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=903


I think I'm going to add this to my normal daily news sites that I visit.
http://www.unisevil.com/temp213.htm

[SlyHunter]

In an early March briefing before congressional staff, members of the press, and scientists, Professor Richard S. Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology assailed the politically driven work of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), charging the panel misrepresents the work of its contributing scientists to fit a preconceived agenda.

"The whole notion of a scientific consensus has been contrived to disguise the genuine disagreement among scientists on a number of different issues. Major media outlets announced, incorrectly, as early as 1988 that the issue of global warming was scientifically settled, and the IPCC has been spending over a decade trying desperately to make their reports conform to this belief," said Lindzen.

"To think that hundreds of scientists could be in full agreement in dozens of separate disciplines is ridiculous," he said. "The aura of certainty with which the IPCC's conclusions are being reported is clearly more a matter of politics than science."

Advocates of the theory of catastrophic global warming have managed to manipulate results of climate science for years now, Lindzen said, using a variety of strategies to mislead the public and the media. Among those deceptive strategies:

issuing a summary that misrepresents the contents of the full report; using language that means different things to scientists and laymen; and exploiting public ignorance--and the embarrassment about this ignorance--over scientific matters. The congressional briefing, titled "The Search for Scientific Consensus, or The IPCC and the One-Handed Scientists," was hosted by the Cooler Heads Coalition, a subgroup of the National Consumers Coalition that focuses on global warming issues. Members of the Cooler Heads Coalition include the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Consumer Alert, the 60 Plus Association, and Frontiers of Freedom.

http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=939

[skunk]

It would be better to recreate it from scratch even if it meant having two world governments because nobody could agree on just one.
I think we tried that already. It was called the Cold War.

[Sayhey]

Although not directly related to the issue posted, I have never liked the UN...I love the idea, and perhaps in the future it might be reworked to be more effective...but for now, I have these problems:
1) The fact that the UN goes after consensus decision-making, makes the process very slow in its' response to the problems at hand...if there was a dangerous development going on in the world, the time it took to decide on a couse of action, could already make any decision too late to have any real relevance/effectiveness
2) As related to 1), most decisions, to gain consensus are compromise positions which further water-down the potential effectiveness of any action/policy
3) As related to both above, the veto power that the permanent members of the security council enjoy, can often ruin any effective policy decisions in one stroke...
The UN process seems somewhat analgous to the methods employed by a split Congress...arguing down party lines, stonewalling, back-room favors, fillibusters and contention over inconsequential details...at least the Congress is all from one country...The UN includes and must recogognize and appease the concerns of many...I somewhat worry about the EU in this respect, also...
I apologize if I have been somewhat incomplete here, but you get the idea...

Most of your criticisms stem from the fact that the UN is not a "world government" - never has been and was never meant to be such a structure. Has it been invaluable in the last 50 years as a place for nations to discuss their concerns and to provide resources for such things as conflict resolution, peacekeeping, health education, disaster relief, and so on? Absolutely. It does not have any more power than what sovereign nations give it and as such it is limited in its ability to "enforce" many things we would like to see as standards throughout the world. In short, your criticisms are unfair because the expectation is unrealistic from such a world body. If you want to advocate a world governmental body then I can understand your points, but I would point out that the likelihood of nations ceding such authority to a United Nations of that type are practically nil.

[blackfox]

Most of your criticisms stem from the fact that the UN is not a "world government" - never has been and was never meant to be such a structure. Has it been invaluable in the last 50 years as a place for nations to discuss their concerns and to provide resources for such things as conflict resolution, peacekeeping, health education, disaster relief, and so on? Absolutely. It does not have any more power than what sovereign nations give it and as such it is limited in its ability to "enforce" many things we would like to see as standards throughout the world. In short, your criticisms are unfair because the expectation is unrealistic from such a world body. If you want to advocate a world governmental body then I can understand your points, but I would point out that the likelihood of nations ceding such authority to a United Nations of that type are practically nil.
Point taken Sahey...I did not mean to imply that the UN has not/does not provide valuble service(s) to the world community...I guess I just wonder about their continued relevancy at a time when nations take or leave their advice...and how many people might be similarily misinformed as to the use/role of the UN in the 21st century. Regardless, thankyou for correcting my ignorance...that is one of the reasons why I like posting here...

[SlyHunter]

I havn't read about it yet on the internet but I heard on tv that Kofi Anan has issued letters to folks saying not to turn in any information about the oil for food fiasco without first passing it by him. Seems like they are trying to cover up their illegal dealings.