The UN Human Wrongs Council, cont’d.

Anne Bayefsky has a new column about the unchangeable anti-Israel bias of the UN.

The widespread misrepresentation of the Council made its self-immolation in its first two weeks of operation even more striking. The Human Rights Council is now the U.N.’s lead human-rights body, and examples of egregious human-rights violations should not have been hard to find. In Darfur, there are three quarters of a million people beyond humanitarian reach, 2.5 million people displaced by the violence, 385,000 people in immediate risk of starvation, and over two million dead in 22 years of violence and deprivation. But it wasn’t genocide in Sudan that interested the Human Rights Council. Nor was it a billion Chinese without civil and political rights. Not 13 million women in Saudi Arabia whose lives depend on hiding from sight in public places and never being caught behind the wheel of an automobile. Not the dire human-rights conditions of 23 million people in North Korea. Not Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s incitement to genocide or his country’s legal system, which includes crucifixion, stoning and amputation.

No; there was only one country singled out by the U.N. Human Rights Council, and that was Israel. The Council decided that the program for the first session should focus discussion on five issues; the first one being the “human rights situation in the occupied Arab Territories, including Palestine.” (The rest were “support for the Abuja Peace Agreement,” and three thematic subjects.) The Council placed criticism of Israel permanently on the agenda of all future sessions. It gave only the special investigator on Israel what amounted to a permanent mandate. On its final day, the Council passed just one resolution condemning human-rights violations by any of the 192 U.N. members, and directed it at Israel. When it was all over, the Council decided to hold its first special (emergency) session within a few days — on Israel.

The numbers explain it all. There are 47 states on the Human Rights Council divided among five regional groups. Fifty-five percent are from the African and Asian regional groups. In the May election, the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) garnered a majority on both the African and Asian regional groups, thereby giving them the balance of power. Since no criterion exists for Council membership other than geography, countries like China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia were elected without difficulty. Furthermore, 32 of the 47 new Council members are from the so-called Group of 77, and when it comes to human rights, developing nations have proven themselves a highly effective protection racket.

[…] In other Council “improvements,” a decision by the Commission to hold a special session required a majority vote; at the Council, only one third of the members are required. On Friday, 21 of 47 members asked for a special session on Israel, thereby meeting the lower Council threshold. In fact, the 17 Islamic members alone satisfy the new requirement.

Read the rest.