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Lawfare and the UN Human Rights Council

November 06, 2010 19:43

Brilliant speech by Trevor S. Norwitz reported on UN Watch.

It completely demolishes the absurdity of the UNHRC, the Goldstone Report, the so-called Flotilla Inquiry and the abuse of laws designed to protect democracies from the very people that are now using those same laws to attack those democracies.

This is highlighted on the sane website here: "Cuba Organizing Rogue Speakers’ List of Hardliners in Bid to Ambush U.S. at Friday’s U.N. Review", where an alliance of the far Left dictators and Venezuela are attempting to dominate the UN Review in order to attack the US.

The US is not and should not be immune from criticism, but unlike most of the countries doing the hatchet job on the US's reputation, the US is a democracy with a strong record on self-examination and self-criticism and responding, sometimes tardily, to misdemeanours of its armed forces. It is, therefore, monstrous, that Iran and Cuba can point an accusing finger at the US when their record on human rights, especially Iran's, is abysmal.

It appears that the UN and its instruments are now an international union of nations inimical to democracy and peace who use the organs of the UN to spout lies and hypocrisy.

Is it not about time the UN took more robust action and limited its councils to true democracies rather than than allowing them to become propaganda weapons for serial human rights abusers?

The Norwitz speech is as strong a condemnation of the Flotilla Inquiry farce as I have seen.

Here's a flavour of the speech:

Almost anything created for a good purpose can be abused or even “weaponized”: think of an ice-pick, a candlestick, a box-cutter knife, an airplane, a shoe, a pair of underpants.

And not just physical objects. We have seen the abuse of almost every institution invented by man: democracy (think of Venezuela, Iran, the Weimar Republic); education (look at Gaza under Hamas or the PLO, Apartheid South Africa); religion (no examples needed).

It should be no surprise then that the law - one of humanity’s greatest achievements, designed for the creation of ordered societies, the establishment and maintenance of justice and the determination and protection of truth - is also susceptible to abuse.

Today what is really under attack is perhaps the most fundamental value in our Western culture: truth. And it is ironic in the extreme that it is the law, which was created and designed to be the servant and protector of truth, that is the enemy’s weapon of choice to undermine the truth.

I strongly recommend you read it all.

(first published at http://www.raymondcook.net/blog/index.php/2010/11/06/lawfare-and-the-un-...)

November 06, 2010 19:43

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