An overview of the UN Human Rights Council...

Anne Bayefsky is not happy that the US is joining the UN Human Rights Council...here is her list of what the Council has accomplished....

o The Council has adopted a formal agenda of ten items that governs all its meetings. One agenda item is reserved for condemning Israel. This item is called the “human-rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”; the human rights of Israelis are deliberately omitted. And one agenda item is assigned to the human rights of the remaining 99.9 percent of the world’s population. By taking a seat on the Council, the United States will be agreeing to this agenda and to the resulting apportionment of the Council’s time.

o Every morning throughout the Council sessions, all U.N. member states meet to strategize and share information in one of the U.N.’s five regional groups. All that is, except Israel. At the Council, Israel is denied membership in any regional group, including the amalgam of Western states to which the United States belongs. The United States is, therefore, about to attend a continuous stream of meetings through doors effectively marked “no representatives of the Jewish people allowed.”

o The Council has had ten regular sessions concerning human rights worldwide and five special sessions to condemn Israel.

o The Council has adopted more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than all the other 191 U.N. member states combined.

o The Council has terminated human-rights investigations of such paragons as Belarus, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia.

o The last time the Council took action on Sudan was seven months ago. The resolution on that country “acknowledges . . . the steps taken by the Government of the Sudan to strengthen the human-rights legal and institutional framework, principally in law reform.” (The Sudanese criminal code prohibits homosexuality, makes adultery a capital offense, and provides for flogging, amputation, stoning, and crucifixion.)

o The Council has just terminated every investigation of “consistent patterns of gross and reliably attested violations of all human rights and all fundamental freedoms.” Under this heading, it has discontinued investigations of the likes of Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Maldives, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Even the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission had investigations under way every year since this process began in 1974.

o The Council president has made a procedural ruling that any commentary connecting the practice of Islam to human-rights violations is out of order.

o The Council has sabotaged the key resolution in the U.N. system on freedom of expression. The resolution now requires investigation of “abuses of the right of freedom of expression” . Most Council members do not permit freedom of expression, much less suffer from the abuse of it.

o The Council regularly adopts resolutions on the “defamation of religions,” an overt attempt by Islamic states to stymie free speech of individuals in the name of protecting “religion.”

o The Council has made repeated efforts to circumvent universal principles. It has spawned numerous entities charged with searching for “normative gaps” — with the intention of filling them with sharia exemption clauses.

o The Council has created an investigator charged with reporting on respect for “cultural diversity” (read: the refusal to hold Islamic states to universal standards of human rights). Not surprisingly, this plan was spearheaded by some of the worst human-rights abusers on the planet: Iran, Syria, Cuba, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Belarus.

o The Council’s one new device — the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) — was heralded as introducing a careful examination of all U.N. states without discrimination. What actually happens is that a series of human-rights abusers congratulate one another, avoid any serious scrutiny, and then denigrate the democracies that agreed to the travesty in the first place.