The U.N. Charade

From Frida Ghitis: The U.N. Charade on Human Rights

The commission this year includes countries like Sudan, whose government, much of the world agrees, is complicit in the murder of tens of thousands and the forced displacement of millions of the country's citizens. A UN report found the government and its allies guilty of carrying out a policy of murdering, raping, torturing, and destroying the villages of non-Arab Sudanese in the Darfur region of the country. The world can't quite agree on whether Sudan's government is guilty of genocide or crimes against humanity. Yet Sudan's representative will help ''set the standards" for human rights around the world.

God help us all.

Sudan will receive presumably invaluable help in its efforts to protect human rights from the government of Zimbabwe, whose president used battalions of thugs to intimidate the opposition, destroy freedom of the press, and successfully destroy the country's economy, plunging most of its population into poverty. They will work shoulder to shoulder with that other defender of freedom, equality, and tolerance: Saudi Arabia.

Monarchs, despots, and dictators of all stripes will contribute to the commission's work, with regime representatives from such paragons of human rights as Cuba, Nepal, Egypt, Pakistan, Swaziland, Bhutan, and China, among others, helping craft the agenda to defend human rights and individual freedoms around the world.

...The commission is an insult to the millions of people who have fled their homes running from slaughter and now live in squalid refugee camps in places like Chad, Sudan, and Congo. It is an affront to the hundreds of millions of women treated as second-class citizens and abused with the consent of their governments in dozens of countries around the world. It mocks the struggle of millions in the Middle East and other parts of Asia, Africa, and even parts of Europe, who want to share the freedoms others take for granted in much of the world.

The gathering of what is supposed to be the world's principal body for protecting human rights should bring hope to the oppressed around the world. Instead, it sinks their spirits. What could be more discouraging than seeing your oppressors treated as honorable members of that, of all commissions?

(Hat tip: Solomonia)