UN Watch in the News
Hillel Neuer and Paula Schriefer
Monitor (Uganda)
November 23, 2008
As a controversial new chamber of the UN Human Rights Council gets underway, Freedom House and UN Watch are urging member states to turn the international spotlight toward the human rights catastrophe in the DR Congo. A joint November 18 letter sent to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay follows below:
Dear Secretary-General Ban and High Commissioner Pillay,
As you gather with world leaders to celebrate the new chamber of the UN Human Rights Council, we urge you to take advantage of this moment to turn the international spotlight toward the human rights catastrophe in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mass displacement, killings and sexual violence—involving hundreds of thousands of victims—require an urgent response by the UN Human Rights Council.
We urge you to use your moral voice by calling on the Council to immediately convene a special session for the desperate victims. The procedure requires support from a mere one third of the Council’s 47 members. We are certain that 16 state members can be found to endorse such an initiative.
Precedent shows that you can have a powerful impact. Appeals issued by both your predecessors, Kofi Annan and Louise Arbour, helped pressure Council members in 2006 to convene a special session for the victims of Darfur. We urge you to do no less today for the victims in the Congo.
Such a session should immediately reinstate the human rights monitor for the DRC, whose recent elimination by the Council, which deferred to the DRC government’s opposition to any independent monitoring, was unconscionable.
Further, in voting to scrap the mandate, Council members at the March 2008 session made baseless attacks on the mandate-holder, Titinga Frédéric Pacéré, and false claims about the human rights situation in the DRC.
Tunisia’s Ali Cherif spoke of “the positive developments in the human rights situation there”—indeed, “remarkable progress”—and chastised the expert because such “improvements” were “not duly reflected in [his] report.” Algeria, too, claimed “significant progress” in the DRC, where “the situation is being normalised.”
Egypt’s Omar Shalaby, on behalf of the African Group, said the DRC boasted an “environment conducive to the promotion and protection of human rights”, with “serious measures aimed at promoting the realisation of economic, social, and cultural rights.”
He said that “the mandate has not offered clear prospects for improving the human rights situation on the ground”; that it “has not been of benefit to the DRC”; and that “any renewal of the mandate would be counterproductive.”
We note with deep concern that since the June 2007 reform package, the Council has gradually eliminated human rights monitoring mandates for victims in Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, DRC, and Darfur. Your moral voice can help to stop the atrocities in DRC—but you must act now.
Mr. Neuer is executive director of UN Watch.
Ms. Schriefer is director of advocacy at Freedom House.
Copyright 2008, CNS News.com
Original URL: http://www.monitor.co.ug/artman/publish/oped/UN_must_act_to_stop_Congo_tragedy_75451.shtml
