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Posted by , on March 18th, 2011

Oh look, an American who doesn’t like the UN (see comment #1 for rebuttal)

  • Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Link, Stupid

One comment

  • Chris
    March 18, 2011 at 11:41 am

    You can tell someone’s clutching at straws when they try the same arguments as Andrew Bolt.

    Yes, there was a document drafted by the human rights commission to praise Libya. This was drafted well before the most recent nastiness started. And the praise was basically praise for being slightly less shit than they used to be on human rights. It was “yes, you’re still pretty bad, yes you’ve got a long way to go, but you’re getting better.” Since Gaddafi’s explosion of herptastic derpitude, the Commission has, obviously, abandoned that draft.

    Yes, there are nations with poor records on human rights, gender equality etc on UN Commissions. It’d be pretty hard to have UN Commissions if nations with records of (ongoing) rights abuses were excluded, as most nations wouldn’t qualify. Australia, the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, all those warm fuzzy countries with respect for Western Ideals and Human Rights break the rules all over the place. But yes, Iran and Saudi Arabia are worse. But they’re on those Commissions (as Libya is/was on the UNHRC) in order to exert increased peer pressure on those nations to improve their performance. They’re there so that they can be part of the overall process, to avoid making them feel as they’re being ordered to do something by a group they have no input in.

    It’s not ideal. But it’s international diplomacy. Not ideal comes with the territory, unless we just want to declare war on every country with a bad record to force them to behave.

    Aside from anything else, doing so would put us in that group of international miscreants.. And as Gaddafi knows, the international community doesn’t like it when you declare war on your on country.

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