More On the United Nations and Individual Rights

I've written many times in the past with my criticisms of the United Nations. A few weeks ago I watched a couple of videos of UN Watch speeches at the UN, and I was blown away. This sat in my queue to blog about for a few weeks, but as followup to my posting this morning about individual rights articles in The Economist, you can consider this one Part 2 posting of recent items on individual rights.

First, some videos from YouTube that are worth seeing:

• UN Watch Confronts UN on Sudan - Wow. A thorough bashing of the inaction on the situation in Darfur.
• UN Watch Confronts UN on Human Rights - Wow. A thorough damning of the council on human rights. Examples given of the massive hypocrisy of condeming Israel time and again, but doing nothing about far more severe issues in so many other countries around the world. Simply amazing. Then the speech is deemed "not admissable"... on that, see the next video.
• UN Watch: What is Admissable and What is Not - A litany of examples of things that have been accepted as speeches at the UN, to be compared with the above statement from UN Watch that was not "admitted". (Includes duplicate of the above video as second half.)
• UN Watch on Canada - A generally positive report about Canada's efforts, but examples given of how it could do more. Presumably much the same could be said about the other countries that rate highly on the UN Watch report card.

Then the second item I wanted to mention here is an April press release from the Ayn Rand Institute, The UN Human Rights Council's War on Human Rights. This is focused on the recent UN "resolution urging nations to pass laws prohibiting the dissemination of ideas that 'defame religion.'" Read their press release to see a principled response that defends freedom of speech as the crucial individual right that it is.

And the third item is the article "Bad Counsel: The UN Adrift on Human Rights" from the April 7th-13th issue of The Economist. It is critical of the same religion defamation resolution, but also has the following general criticisms of the UN Human Rights Council:

In its fourth regular session, which ended in Genevea on March 30th, the 47-member council again failed to address many egregious human-rights abuses around the world. Even in the case of Darfur, on which one of its own working groups had produced a damning report, it declined to criticise the Sudanese government directly for orchestrating the atrocities, limiting itself to an expression of "deep concern". Indeed, in its nine months of life, the council has criticised only one country for human-rights violations, passing in its latest session its ninth resolution against Israel.

This obsession with bashing Israel and turning a blind eye to so much else has disappointed those who hoped that the new council might perform better than its predecessor. Now alarm is growing that its anti-Israel bias is going to becompounded by an excessive zeal to defend the good name of religions, and especially that of Islam, at the expense of free speech.

...

A central task for the new council was supposed to be regular reviews of human rights in each of the UN's 192 member states. But nine months since its founding, nothing has happened. A key test of whether the council would prove any better than its derided predecessor would be to get this "universal periodic review" under way, Louise Arbour, the UN's respected High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the Geneva meeting. The council has now given itself a year to establish such a mechanism.

Predictions on what we will see resulting from this a year from now?