[Washington Post] Editorial - When the Human Rights Council was approved by the General Assembly in March, we were among the skeptics who doubted that it would be much of a change, mainly because the membership rules still allowed for the election of human rights violators. As it turned out, we were wrong: The council, which completed its second formal session last week in Geneva, has turned out to be far worse than its predecessor - not just a "shadow" but a travesty that the UN can ill afford. The previous UN commission occasionally discussed and condemned the regimes most responsible for human rights crimes, such as those in Belarus and Burma. The new council, in contrast, has so far taken action on only one country, which has dominated the debate at both of its regular meetings and been the sole subject of two extraordinary sessions: Israel. If there is no turnaround, the council's performance ought to invite consideration of the measure that was applied to the UN cultural organization, UNESCO, when it ran amok in the 1980s: a cutoff of U.S. funding. If this ill-formed body is to become an exclusive forum for anti-Zionist rants, the principal victim will be not Israel but the UN.
2006-10-12 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive