The farce at the UNHRC

November 15, 2007
The National Post
Original Source: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=dbf27a3f-ff36-4a58-a281-3a57e1d1a465

We never thought it possible that any successor body would actually prove itself worse than the ineffectual and biased UN Commission on Human Rights. But we were wrong. The new Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which replaced the commission last year, not only cannot find the will to denounce the most abusive regimes in the world -- which was the knock against the old commission -- its agenda is now being driven by rogue dictatorships; namely, Fidel Castro's Cuba and Moammar Khaddafi's Libya.
This summer, after forbidding UN rights experts to investigate complaints against it for more than 20 years, Cuba suddenly relented. Jean Ziegler, a Swiss sociology professor and official UNHRC expert on Cuba, was invited by Havana to visit, a move he hailed as a signal that Cuba is opening up to collaboration with the UN.
More like a signal that Cuba was willing to collaborate with a lifelong ideological sympathizer.
As early as 1964, Professor Ziegler expressed his admiration for the Cuban communists. That year, he served as Che Guevara's chauffeur when Guevara was on a trade mission in Geneva for the Cuban government. He was convinced by Guevara not to emigrate to the island nation, but to stay in Western Europe where he might fight more directly the enemies of Cuba's revolution and international Marxism. His appointment to his post as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food was sponsored by Cuba in 2000, 2003 and 2007. And the invitation for him to visit Cuba on behalf of the UNHRC was made only after Cuba had successfully orchestrated the firing of the previous UN expert on Cuba -- the one it had barred entry to for two decades.
Not coincidentally, Prof. Ziegler is also co-founder and vice-chairman of the foundation that administers the Moammar KhaddafiPrize for Human Rights, and arranged for Fidel Castro to win the US$250,000 award in 1998. (Other victors include the children of Palestine, notorious American anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.)
The latest outrage is that Prof. Ziegler permitted undercover Cuban agents to monitor a press conference he gave in Geneva prior to his stage-managed visit to the Caribbean dictatorship last month. While he praised the Cuban government in advance of his fact-finding trip, Cuban spies took note of journalists' question and tone, even seeking the name and news organization of one French journalist who was particularly critical of the professors' pre-judgments.
But the farce at the UNHRC doesn't end with Prof. Ziegler. During its first full year of operations -- a year dominated by genocide in Darfur and ruthless suppression of dissent in Iran, to name but two examples -- the UNHRC managed to pass only two motions of condemnation. (Both were against Israel, naturally.) According to UN Watch, a non-profit, Geneva-based organization, the [UNHRC] has been dominated by an increasingly brazen alliance of repressive regimes seeking not only to spoil needed reforms but to undermine the few meaningful mechanisms of UN human rights protection.
All of this supports critics' claims that the new Human Rights Council is actually a more cynical and toxic body than the Commission on Human Rights it was designed to replace. So long as such UN bodies are dominated by rogue states and their First World sympathizers, their pronouncements on Cuba, Israel and every other subject will be bereft of moral authority.