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Geneva Conventions

[Wall Street Journal, 21Jun07] Anne Bayefsky - A year ago, then Secretary-General Kofi Annan dissolved the UN Commission on Human Rights under pressure, after the commission discredited itself repeatedly, even electing a Libyan chairman. Now its successor - the UN Human Rights Council - is proving itself to be worse than what it replaced. Last week the council marked its first anniversary in Geneva, Switzerland, by adopting an agenda that is an affront to the civilized world. It deletes the job of investigating human rights violations in the brutal dictatorships of Belarus and Cuba and instead focuses its attention uniquely on Israel. The UN General Assembly created the council without specifying membership criteria, such as, say, actually respecting human rights. On Sudan, the council waited six months and then decided to start another UN fact-finding mission. When Sudan refused to let the human rights monitors into the country, the council created an "expert group" that remained in Geneva to focus on reviewing UN documents. Now the council has given the group six more months. Meanwhile, two million people have been displaced and up to 400,000 have died in Darfur. The writer edits www.EyeOnTheUN.org, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and is a professor at Touro College in New York.
2007-06-26 01:00:00
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