You couldn’t make it up. Syria could become an elected member of the UN Human Rights Council on the 20th May 2011.
It appears that the Council comprises of 47 member states and each is elected for a 3 year term with one third becoming vacant each year. According to the UN General Assembly resolution creating the council in 2006 Asia is assigned 13 of the 47 seats, with the other four regional blocks sharing the remaining 34 and four of the 13 African seats are up for grabs now.
So Syria has pledged its (don’t laugh) ‘Commitment to respect and to support the inalienable nature of all human rights’. Adding that it would ‘contribute to accomplish the objectives of the council and would support the national and international efforts for promotion and protection of human rights for all, without distinction and selectivity or politicalisation’.
This takes Chutzpah to new heights. The current regime has no legitimacy as they have never held free elections, do not protect civil liberties have no due process and no independent judiciary.
They do exercise torture, administrative detention and censorship and these last few weeks the streets of their cities have become the killing fields of the Middle East for those Syrians brave enough to seek change and take to the streets to protest.
The British Foreign Office even extended to their diplomats an invitation to ‘The Wedding’ tomorrow which has now, thankfully been withdrawn.
Quoting Ian Birrell in yesterdays London Evening Standard, British foreign policy is ‘spinning’ with the ‘Arab Spring’ and our lame Foreign Minister, William Hague, warned the Cabinet that the path ahead could be long and bumpy.
Syria is pivotal to the Middle East as it stands between Iran and Lebanon and its alliances with Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.
President Bashar Assad is mishandling events and many innocent people are being slaughtered but misguided Hague has gone on record as referring to him as a reformer.
This, in my opinion, leaves Israel as a new Jewish Ghetto in the region albeit with a thriving economy and unjust world wide condemnation plus attempts at de-legitimisation whilst those who have little or no respect for human life or the rights of its citizens become potentially elevated to the UN Human Rights Council.
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