by Jan Logie
At the current session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, Russia has tabled a resolution seeking to promote “traditional values” as a basis for human rights. Numerous UN experts have emphasised that traditional values are frequently invoked by States to justify human rights violations, such as family violence, marital rape, forced marriage and female genital mutilation.
I know from my, limited, experience at UN Meetings that language is fiercely contested and this would certainly give ground to the very conservative forces. I also know from my visit to Uganda earlier this year that this resolution would bloster those seeking to deny the human rights of Gay, Lesbian and Trans people as they’re already using traditional values as justification for their draconian measures that include the death penalty.
There is absolutely no recognition in Russia’s draft resolution that many practices inconsistent with human rights derive from traditional values. If this resolution is passed, there is no doubt that Governments in future will use “traditional values” to restrict human rights.
Last year, the Human Rights Council tasked its Advisory Committee to prepare a report on traditional values. Now Russia wants to proceed with a new resolution before the Advisory Committee has even finished its report. Russia’s resolution is therefore premature and procedurally flawed.
A preliminary report of the Advisory Committee is highly critical of a traditional values approach to human rights, calling traditional values “vague, subjective and unclear” and noting that “those most marginalized and disenfranchised have the most to lose from a traditional values approach to human rights”.
The Human Rights Council will vote on the resolution TOMORROW (September 27/28)!
Please email: Murray.McCully@Parliament.govt.nz to ask him to ensure our opposition is known.
Published in Justice & Democracy by Jan Logie on Wed, September 26th, 2012
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Newsflash, Green Party NZ suddenly discovers that tyrannies use the UN to lobby for protection for their tyrannical behaviour.
The entire history of the UN is littered with this, it is why during the Cold War hoards of dictatorships would vote en masse to damn Israel and South Africa for their abuses of human rights, it is how Libya, Syria and China get on the Human Rights Committee It has long provided a forum for the vilest of the vile to claim legitimacy. It saw mass slaughter in Cambodia, Equatorial Guinea and Indonesia all get ignored, and Russia has didn’t even have a decade of even rudimentary recognition of basic individual rights in the last century.
For example, China and much of the Arab countries and many others have long promote the ITU regulating the internet in order to get multilateral consensus on regulating content. NZ, the UK, the US and most OECD countries have long fought loudly against this.
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I don’t think that’s news, but such an overarching attack is very worrying.
Thankfully the mInister has directed the Geneva team to work alongside like-minded states to ensure this motion doesn’t undermine human rights work.
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Yes, L/Scott, although don’t forget that the United Nations was also used to bring pressure to bear against Tasmania when it still criminalised male homosexuality. And what on Earth was wrong with using the UN against South African apartheid?!? It was a vile, illiberal system propped up by coercive state power. And actually, Russia never really went through the Enlightenment- it’s been one dreary long period of authoritarian tyranny after another, whether Tsarist absolute monarchy, Stalinist communism or Putinist post-communism. Actually, there is a tiresome tradition of authoritarian social conservatives and right-wing conspiracy theorists attacking the UN as well, for that matter- such as the John Birch Society, Australian League of Rights, Lyndon La Rouche ad nauseum.
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Craig, nothing wrong whatsoever about the UN’s damnation of apartheid, but it was akin to Graham Capill sounding off about others being immoral. Those who were loudest were at home incarcerating and murdering their own political opponents, and indeed the vast bulk of them happily turned a blind eye to each other. The height of moral relativism, and it is exactly why Syria is going nowhere, because Russia is profiting from the war and China has never been keen on people taking on their own governments.
I’ve been a delegate to UN organisation meetings, and watched the Western delegates walking from 3 star hotels having flown economy class long haul arrive, whilst the poverty pleading third world delegates arrive in droves by limousine, staying at 5 star hotels having flown first class, spending most of the session not attending until the last day when they plead the case of being poor. It’s repulsive, but rarely confronted, indeed those on the left who claim to care about the poor almost never take on the nepotistic featherbedding thieves who participate in this outfit (indeed Helen Clark is now part of that establishment and being paid an eye-wateringly high taxpayer funded salary tax free).
The UN is useful as a talking shop, but let’s not pretend that it has ever been a place where human rights can be consistently and objectively confronted. It welcomes tyrants with blood dripping from their hands to speak as statesmen, where, if they were not gangsters leading their states of oppression, they would be doing life sentences as mass murderers. Ahmadinejad, Mugabe, Ceausescu, Mobutu et al.
Yet the Greens most frequently quote the UN as if it is a repositary of authority that should bind the NZ government, but treat other foreign organisations as sinister.
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It isn’t a “discovery” for us, we’ve known all along.
A blinkered view of the Green party? Well, that doesn’t surprise us coming from you either.
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Well, I certainly agree with you about Ahmadinejad, L/Scott. He’s a corrupt despot, and his regime is responsible for the butchery of numerous Iranian lesbians and gay men, given that it is a capital offence to be lesbian or gay within that state. Exactly the same objections apply to Mugabe in Zimbabwe, although they also apply to Nigeria- under the Bush administration, a US ally. Or Assad’s Syria, of similar dubious merit, yet enlisted in the US “War on Terror.”
It is indeed the case that the United Nations is not a perfect institution, but the alternative is no brake at all on the various excesses perpetrated by Washington, Beijing and possibly also New Delhi eventually during the coming century of multipolar relationships.
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This article is an unproven demagogic lie in interest of [frog: Deleted. Homophobic, and provides no reference or argument in support of the contention being made.]
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L/Scott, I concur with your comments about Russia and China, although we do need to be prudent when it comes to commenting about the latter. I have little time for China’s assistance to Burma’s military dictatorship, although that’s understandable given that it needs Burma’s oil reserves for development in adjacent Yunan province. Added to which, I do concede that the United States played a constructive rule in Sudan, even during the otherwise benighted Bush II administration. Unfortunately, China didn’t, arms running to the regime there and enabling the Darfur tragedy. That said, I share Beijing’s opinion of the rather creepy, homophobic and authoritarian Falun Gong/Dafa cult.
However, I believe that the UN should be reformed, not walked away from. It is an imperfect institution, granted. However, it does manage some constructive activity. It’s just a shame that it’s being hamstrung over the brutal and corrupt Assad regime by great power interference at present.
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