Tuesday, May 09, 2006

You can always count on the UN to be totally useless

The UN formed a new Human Rights council and based on who was elected to the council they must be thinking that they'd add the countries that do the abusing in order to gain a better understanding on human right abuses. Really that's gotta be their reasoning...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations elected 44 of the initial 47 members of its new Human Rights Council in a first round of voting on Tuesday, including five nations named by rights groups as among the world's worst abusers.

Russia, China, Cuba, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, identified by New York-based Human Rights Watch as unworthy of membership on the new U.N. body, were among those winning seats.


Other nations totally NOT known for their dedication to human rights that made the council are Jordan and 13 African nations (Algeria, Cameroon, Djibouti, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia, and Zambia). I include the African nations not because they're necessarily human rights abusers, but because Africa has many of the world's most corrupt regimes even if they aren't "human rights abusers" according to Human Rights Watch. Here's the official UN results page with a complete list of the nations elected.

You'll notice the US was not elected, and it's not because we've got some horrific human rights violations. We removed ourselves because we took issue with the previous UN human rights council, countries on the council, and we felt appropriate standards were still not in place to keep abusers from being elected to the new council. I'm sure we have the man with the mustache to thank for sticking to his priciples here. Good work Johnny!