Post by cjm on Apr 5, 2014 5:41:00 GMT
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South Africa has just returned to the Human Rights Council – which has 47 rotating members – after an absence of several years, so it has been a while since anyone was able to clearly observe its human rights thinking.
What emerges is a picture of casting votes for political, rather than human rights, purposes, the tendency which bedevilled the old UN Human Rights Commission and which the new Human Rights Council was designed to change.
The result in South Africa’s case – and no doubt, many other cases if one were to examine them – is a lack of consistent principle in voting.
Of the nine resolutions passed so far, South Africa abstained on four, which criticised human rights violations in Syria, Sri Lanka, Iran and North Korea, and voted for five, which criticised Israel for various aspects of its occupation of Syrian Golan and the West Bank.
South Africa’s voting pattern reveals clearly that while it is deeply ambivalent about human rights abuses in what one may call non-Western countries, such ambivalence falls away when it comes to a country, Israel, which is a close Western ally.
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www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/opinion/why-sa-s-staying-quiet-on-evil-is-a-mystery-1.1671467#.Uz-Uz4-vgwQ
South Africa has just returned to the Human Rights Council – which has 47 rotating members – after an absence of several years, so it has been a while since anyone was able to clearly observe its human rights thinking.
What emerges is a picture of casting votes for political, rather than human rights, purposes, the tendency which bedevilled the old UN Human Rights Commission and which the new Human Rights Council was designed to change.
The result in South Africa’s case – and no doubt, many other cases if one were to examine them – is a lack of consistent principle in voting.
Of the nine resolutions passed so far, South Africa abstained on four, which criticised human rights violations in Syria, Sri Lanka, Iran and North Korea, and voted for five, which criticised Israel for various aspects of its occupation of Syrian Golan and the West Bank.
South Africa’s voting pattern reveals clearly that while it is deeply ambivalent about human rights abuses in what one may call non-Western countries, such ambivalence falls away when it comes to a country, Israel, which is a close Western ally.
...
www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/opinion/why-sa-s-staying-quiet-on-evil-is-a-mystery-1.1671467#.Uz-Uz4-vgwQ