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January 28, 2006
Posted 6:30 PM
by Mary
Groups Fault US Vote in UN on Gays By Warren Hoge The New York Times Friday 27 January 2006 United Nations - Human rights organizations and the co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus protested on Thursday a decision by the Bush administration to back a measure introduced by Iran denying two gay rights groups a voice at the United Nations. In a vote Monday, the United States supported Iran's recommendation to deny consultative status at the United Nations' Economic and Social Council to the Danish National Association for Gays and Lesbians and the International Lesbian and Gay Association, based in Belgium. Nearly 3,000 nongovernmental organizations have such status, which enables them to distribute documents to meetings of the council. Among countries with which the United States sided were Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe, nations the State Department has cited in annual reports for their harsh treatment of homosexuals. Representative Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who is co-chairman of the caucus, wrote a letter to John R. Bolton, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, saying the move was "a major setback" for "a core component of our nation's human rights diplomacy." Matt Foreman, executive director of the Washington-based National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said, "It is an absolute outrage that the United States has chosen to align itself with tyrants - all in a sickening effort to smother voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people around the world." Mark P. Lagon, a deputy assistant secretary of state, said in an interview that the vote did not stem from "being against gay rights groups" but was based on "the controversial history of the International Lesbian and Gay Association - an affiliate of the North American Man/Boy Love Association, was associated with it in the past and openly condoned pedophilia." Scott Long, a Human Rights Watch director, said that the association had publicly expelled the man/boy group in 1994. Martin Thümmel, the German delegate at the vote, protested that "those delegations that claim that this organization is supporting pedophilia are using this as a pretext in order to shirk the real issue of sexual orientation."
January 22, 2006
Posted 11:12 AM
by Mary
The DPI/NGO Section held its first regular weekly NGO briefing in the spring 2006 season. The briefing looked at the recently established Peacebuilding Commission and its mandate, negotiations leading up to the establishing of the Commission, and current developments in making it operational. The Commission was established by the General Assembly on 20 December 2005 and was one of the first reform items outlined in the 2005 World Summit Outcome document to be actually realized. Anna-Karin Eneström, Deputy Chef de Cabinet, Office of the President of the General Assembly; and Bruce Jones, Co-director, Center on International Cooperation, briefed the audience on the latest developments with regard to the newly established Peacebuilding Commission. Robert Orr, Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning, Executive Office of the Secretary-General, also joined the briefing later. Anna-Karin Eneström outlined the negotiations leading up to the establishment of the Commission and the follow-up process to that decision. She briefly described the gaps between Member States on how they wanted the Peacebuilding Commission to work, with two major issues being at the frontline of the negotiations: its membership and the relationship between the Peacebuilding Commission, Security Council, ECOSOC, and other bodies of the UN. She stated that the establishment of the Peacebuilding Commission was of historical importance because never before had a joint subsidiary body of the Security Council and the General Assembly been established. She also praised the hard work done by the two Co-Chairs leading the negotiations: Ambassador Løy of Denmark and Ambassador Mahiga of Tanzania, who will continue their work as Members of the Peacebuilding Commission. Bruce Jones began by praising Ms. Eneström and the General Assembly President Jan Eliasson for their efforts in taking a simple idea of establishing the Peacebuilding Commission to the General Assembly and seeing it through. He pointed out the unfortunate trend in the 1990s for countries emerging from conflict to often relapse back into conflict. According to Dr. Jones, there are three basic reasons for that: the Security Council failed to consult adequately with major donors, troop contributors and the country in question; political and budgetary reasons (short-term peacekeeping contracts); and the fact that implementations on the ground failed. By bringing all actors to the table, the Peacebuilding Commission will be able to facilitate a common framework/strategy for action and its execution. Dr. Jones stressed that there was a substantial role for the NGO community to play to keep the body focussed on the role it is supposed to do. He also said that the UN as an institution did too little to learn from countries that have had similar experiences. Dr. Jones concluded by saying that for the Peacebuilding Commission to be effective action must be taken by the affected countries in the sense that they must be willing to appeal to the Security Council. He invited all Members States to participate accordingly in the Peacebuilding Commission. A question was raised about what country would be a good candidate to be looked at by the Commission. Anna-Karin Enestrom responded by saying that interest had been expressed but it was too early to name any specific countries. Dr. Jones added that countries like Burundi, Sierra Leone and East Timor would be good candidates to begin with. He also mentioned that going into Congo or Haiti would be destined to fail. In response to a question about the role of the NGOs in the Peacebuilding Commission, Ms. Enestrom said that NGOs would play a very important role, although the procedures for that had to be developed. Robert Orr, who joined the briefing, stated that in ten year’s time, peacebuilding may become on of the main pillars of the Organization’s work. He said that the NGOs would play an important role in peacebuilding efforts and urged them to “keep our feet to the fire”, both the United Nations and Member States. In a separate ad hoc briefing Colin Keating, Executive Director, Security Council Report, presented the work of his Organization. He referred the NGOs to their monthly forecast report on their website at www.securitycouncilreport.org, which will preview issues on the Security Council’s agenda and its subsidiary bodies. Mr. Keating agreed to return for another briefing in the near future. The briefing was well attended by about 150 representatives of non-governmental organizations, UN and Permanent Mission staff.
January 21, 2006
Posted 10:10 AM
by Mary
Sidelining Human Rights Jim Lobe January 19, 2006 Jim Lobe is Washington bureau chief for Inter Press Service. The Bush administration's ”global war on terrorism” continued to set back the cause of human rights in 2005, according to a major U.S. rights group, which said that U.S. and European hypocrisy in carrying out that war led to a ”global leadership void” that had been taken advantage of by more opportunistic powers, particularly Russia and China. In the latest in its annual series of ”World Reports,” New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) singled out the Bush administration's multiple defenses of its abusive treatment of detainees as both counterproductive to its efforts to defeat Islamist extremism and particularly destructive to its credibility as a global human rights champion. ”The U.S. government's use and defense of torture and inhumane treatment played the largest role in undermining Washington's ability to promote human rights,” the 532-page report argued. It charged that torture and mistreatment of prisoners has been a ”deliberate policy choice” of the administration's counterterrorism strategy and that new evidence of widespread abuse that came to light during 2005 made clear that ”the problem could not be reduced to a few bad apples at the bottom of the barrel.” The White House immediately dismissed that conclusion, calling it politically motivated and insisting that official policy required that detainees be treated humanely. ”The president made it clear that we do not torture,” said spokesman Scott McClellan. ”The world has seen that we are someone who takes the treatment prisoners very seriously.” ”It appears that the report is based more on a political agenda than on facts,” he went on, noting that the U.S. military had ”liberated” 50 million people from brutal regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. ”If you look at the facts, it's clear that America is leading the way on human rights.” In an introduction to the report, most of which is devoted to assessing important rights-related developments over the year in more than 70 countries, HRW's Executive Director Kenneth Roth stressed that while the administration's detention policies were particularly destructive, its support—or at least tolerance—of abusive allies in the war on terror was also costly. It cited in particular its backing for Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf; its equivocal response to the massacre of hundreds of protestors in Andijan, Uzbekistan, last May; its lifting of military sanctions against Indonesia; and its failure to speak out more forcefully against repression in Russia and serious rights abuses in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. ”The same calculus that led the administration to adopt policies of abusive interrogation and arbitrary detention—the belief that human rights can be sacrificed in the name of fighting terrorism—led it to disregard the promotion of democracy, let alone human rights, with respect to governments that it viewed as allies,” the report asserted. But Washington was not alone in its hypocrisy, it went on. It noted that the British government headed by Prime Minister Tony Blair had not only acted as an ”apologist” for U.S. detention policies, but had also proposed adopting Washington's controversial practice of ”extraordinary renditions”—sending terrorist suspects to foreign governments that have a history of torturing radical Islamists—in violation of the U.N. Convention Against Torture. The European Union also proved disappointing during the year, according to Roth, who noted that the EU ”might have filled the gap” created by Washington's hypocrisy, ”but instead it continued to punch well below its weight, due in part to institutional disarray and in part to competing priorities.” With the exception of Uzbekistan, where the EU suspended its partnership and cooperation agreement and imposed other sanctions after President Islam Karimov refused to agree to an intern ational inquiry into the Andijan massacre, the EU and its member states were reluctant to sacrifice business and important political interests for strong promotion of human rights, according to the report. ”The EU position on Russia in 2005,” it said, ”made the U.S. defense of human rights seem vigorous,” it said, citing similar disappointment with its China policy. It noted that the EU, after ”largely ignoring U.S. rights transgressions” through most of 2005, became ”more assertive only in the face of broad public outrage” triggered by news reports in November that Washington was using European airports for ”extraordinary renditions” and facilities in Poland and Romania to hold suspected terrorists in secret. In the absence of western leadership on rights, Russia and China ”have been all too eager to assert themselves,” according to the report, which characterized the two countries' evolving role as ”nefarious.” In contrast to the EU's strong condemnation of the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan and Washington 's somewhat more equivocal response, China welcomed Karimov to Beijing with a 21-gun salute and a major aid package within two weeks of the killings. Not to be outdone, Russia also lined up behind the Uzbek leader and signed a mutual-defense treaty with him several months later. While Moscow proved least helpful in promoting human rights and democratization in its ”near abroad,” particularly in Uzbekistan, Ukraine, Belarus and Azerbaijan, China's rapid growth and exploding appetite for raw materials ”led to its bolstering of corrupt and repressive regimes in Africa, Latin America and Asia, to the disadvantage of the people in those regions,” according to the report, which noted that it had thrown ”an economic lifeline to such highly abusive governments as Sudan and Zimbabwe.” The report also noted that Russia, China and Uzbekistan, as well as a number of other repressive states, had effectively used the ”war on terrorism” to brand their political foes as ”Islamic terrorists” and justify harsh treatment against them. Washington's credibility in speaking out against such treatment was badly undermined by its own record of detainee abuse, according to the report, which noted that what public pressure the administration exerted, on Arab Middle Eastern countries in particular, to adopt reforms was generally confined to promoting elections. In this, the administration appeared to be taking a page from the Ronald Reagan era (1981-1989) in Central America, where it also promoted and championed ”democracy” and ”elections” even as death squads organized by U.S.-backed armed forces were reaping their grim harvest of dissidents, according to Roth. Despite the disappointing performance of the U.S., the EU and the other great powers, there were human rights bright spots in 2005, according to the report. It cited, among other positive developments, western isolation of Zimbabwe and Burma; India's suspension of most military aid to Nepal after the king's coup; Burma's relinquishment under pressure from its neighbors of its chairmanship of the Association of Southeast Nations; Mexico's leadership role in persuading the United Nations to maintain a special rapporteur on protection of human rights while fighting terrorism; and Kyrgyzstan's refusal to hand over more than 400 refugees to Uzbekistan after the Andijan massacre.
January 10, 2006
Posted 10:44 PM
by Mary
Published on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 by Inter Press Service UN Bodies Survive US Funding Threats by Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS - The United States, a major funder of the United Nations and its myriad agencies, has a longstanding notoriety for exercising its financial clout to threaten U.N. bodies refusing to play ball with Washington. Back in 1984, it withdrew from the Paris-based U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), citing disagreement over its management, and also opposing a proposed plan for the creation of a new international information order. The withdrawal resulted in a substantive 25 percent U.S. cut in UNESCO's annual 180-million-dollar budget. But despite the sharp cut, UNESCO continued to survive -- minus the United States. In 2003, however, Washington returned to the fold, arguing it could live with the then new management. Last month, the administration of President George W. Bush threatened to hold up the U.N. budget for 2006-2007 until and unless member states agreed to U.S.-inspired management reforms, including the appointment of a chief operating officer mandated to run the world body along the lines of a U.S. corporation. Since the overwhelming majority was opposed to some of the proposed reforms, the U.N.'s administrative and budgetary committee eventually agreed on a U.S.-proposed compromise: Secretary-General Kofi Annan was authorised to spend only 950 million dollars over a six-month period pending significant action on reforms, thereby emasculating the U.N.'s traditional biennium budget. "It is clear that in six months we can assess progress on management reform issues and then decide how to address resource questions for the remainder of 2006," U.S. Ambassador Alejandro Wolff told delegates last month. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has withheld a total of about 127 million dollars -- a sum duly appropriated by the U.S. Congress -- from the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).
January 5, 2006
Posted 7:59 PM
by Mary
Kofi Annan's Year-End Review From an outsider's perspective, 2005 could be described in Queen Elizabeth's words, as an "annus horribilis" a horrible year. However in Annan's press conference he demonstrated a renewed focus on several objectives for his last year in office. His top priorities are the ongoing fight against poverty and disease, promoting peace and security, and strengthening the UN. Specifically, he called attention to the ongoing struggle in the Sudan,urging more attention to the Darfur region. Annan cited two accomplishments:the badly needed Emergency Relief Fund, to speed up response to crises, and the Peace Building Commission, providing a detailed mechanism to prevent countries emerging from conflict, from falling back into chaos. The need is great, since 50% of the conflicts in the past 20 years, have recurred within 5 years, following peace agreements. Unfortunately Annan stated that progress has been stalled by lack of a budget. The budget is usually planned for two years, and traditionally by consensus by all 191 member states. If a single country withholds its support, this throws the entire process into disarray. John Bolton, the U.S's abrasive ambassador has exacerbated already existing tensions between the have and have -not countries by demanding that the UN's biennial budget for 2006-2007 should be shrunk to a three-month budget,pending the UN's response to the US demands for change. In a recent speech, in his usual arrogantly blunt-cut style of diplomatic finesse, Bolton targeted the 132 group of developing nations, stating that if they didn't cooperate with the U.S. Washington would look elsewhere to resolve world problems. Paradoxically, this is a clear implication that the U.S., though at present he greatest power in the world, still has to recognize limits. International problems of concern to the U.S cannot be resolved alone. The US, like it or not, needs an international forum to deal with these problems. After the year-end press conference, a last minute deal on the budget was cobbled together, producing a two-year budget limiting first year expenditures by the Secretary General, and a cap for the first half year. (China, and the ambassador from Jamaica, the current chairman for the group of developing countries, criticized the closed door negotiations and protested that by limiting the first half year expenditures, a two year budget has been turned into a six-month budget.) The most significant issue under contention is the effort to establish an effective, impartial, and functioning Human Rights Council. This effort is a response to a deplorable situation in which some of the worst offenders on human rights violations have been or are currently members, for example, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Intense negotiations are continuing on a major restucturing of the Human Rights Commission to be be completed, hopefully, by the end of March. Two proposals have been offered for inclusion of members. One is the establishment of criteria for inclusion. The other proposal is a two-thirds vote by the General Assembly, Annan's original proposal. The first proposal seems to us to create the difficult problem of how and most particularly who will decide if the criteria are met. Kofi Annan has called attention to the division between developed and developing countries making negotiation very difficult. Many of the poorer countries are fearful of an increase of domination by Western powers as well as dilution of the power of the General Assembly. Obviously, because of the division between the have and have-not countries, the selection of the next Secretary General will be very difficult. Yet, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the need for global attention to international problems continues to grow. If only for the need to ward off chaos, and because of the self interest of all the nations of the world, we think there is realistic hope for cooperation. Sometimes open and sometimes buried under the rhetoric, cooperation will continue to happen. Phyllis Ehrenfeld, AEU's National Service Conference to the UN-- Sylvain Ehrenfeld. IHEU Representative to the UN.
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"War does not determine who is right--only who is left." - Bertrand Russell
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