Issue 530
UN rights council to create anti-American post to shield rogue regimes from sanctions
Nominee: Algerian who says the victims of anti-Semitism are “Arabs & Muslims”
GENEVA, March 17, 2015 – The UN Human Rights Council has shortlisted 79-year-old Idriss Jazairy — a former Algerian ambassador who led the Islamic bloc’s attacks on Israel and its “Defamation of Islam” campaign that demonized cartoonists, and who repeatedly states that the victims of anti-Semitism are Arabs — to head a new post backed by Cuba and designed to classify U.S. sanctions against rogue regimes as violations of human rights.
The new “Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights” will be appointed at the close of the current month-long session of the UNHRC.
A committee of five diplomats ranked Jazairy as the top nominee for the post, and the council president indicated on Friday that he was inclined to follow the panel’s recommendations. Read more
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Video: UN Watch Director on Wall Street Journal TV
GENEVA, March 17 – Wall Street Journal TV interviewed UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer concerning U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent speech to the UN Human Rights Council, now holding a month-long session.
In the interview, Neuer gave top grades to Kerry for ridiculing the Syrian-drafted resolution in this session that will condemn Israel for alleged rights abuses on the Golan Heights — at a time when Syrian victims of Assad atrocities flee to hospitals in Israel — but regretted that America’s top diplomat overly praised the 47-nation body, failing to call out its many other Orwellian distortions:
• In this session, the HRC will not adopt a single resolution on massacres by Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Islamic State‘s atrocities in Iraq, nor on gross and systematic human rights violations by HRC member states like China, Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Vietnam.
• Attention has instead been diverted to lengthy panels on “Human Rights Mainstreaming” and “The Effects of Foreign Debt on the Enjoyment of All Human Rights” (a theme that will also get its own special resolution), and, for one entire day, a panel on “Human Rights and Climate Change.”
• While the vast majority of the world’s worst abusers will not be addressed in a single resolution, Egypt, whose failed society and economy has led to mass unemployment affecting millions, will present a text on “the right to work.”
• The Communist regime of Cuba will push through a resolution on the “right to food,” with the wife and colleague of Richard Falk, Hilal Elver, the designated expert to implement it, along with another resolution on “the enjoyment of the cultural rights of everyone and respect for cultural diversity,” a mandate used by dictatorships to justify oppression and abuse of human rights.
• Despite its engagement in mass slaughter in Syria, and its terrorist attacks from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, the Islamic Republic of Iran, acting in the name of the 120-nation Non-Aligned Movement, will submit a resolution on “international cooperation.”
