U.N. Human Rights Council: Oxymoron

Nikki Haley: Laying It on the Line at the United Nations

People who actually believe that the UN has some sort of moral authority don’t like this, but it represents the good side of the Trump Administration: lack of deference to established elites, and a robust support for American values. Which means we have a right to move our embassy to Jerusalem, and the officious busy bodies will have to accept it.

Trump vs. Obama on Foreign Policy

Stupidity at the United Nations: Supporting the Occupy Movement

Yes, the organization that is powerless to prevent real attacks on human rights has taken up a bogus cause:

United Nations officials are using American taxpayers’ money, which subsidizes UN operations, to put their noses into the treatment of Occupy Wall Street protesters in various cities across the United States.

In a letter written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Frank La Rue, UN special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and Maina Kiai, UN special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, the UN officials demanded an explanation of “the behavior of police departments that violently disbanded some Occupy protests last fall.”

The letter, sent in December 2011, was publicly released last week in connection with the 20th annual United Nations Human Rights Council meeting. It complained of “forced removal” by law enforcement officials in various cities, including New York, Portland, Seattle, Denver and Oakland, of “unwilling protesters from the public areas in which they were located.” The letter theorized that the primary reason for the “forced removal” was “related to their dissenting views, criticisms of economic policies, and their legitimate work in the defense of human rights and fundamental freedoms.”

Innocent civilians are being massacred every day in places like Syria and Sudan, which the UN is helpless to prevent. Yet these special rapporteurs focus their attention instead on an internal domestic matter that is none of their business — how local law enforcement officials in the United States decide to deal with lawless behavior. Moreover, the allegations they cite are way off the mark. The police across our country dealt with the utmost patience and restraint against increasingly criminal and violent elements that were taking over the Occupy Wall Street movement. Not to mention having to deal with the public nuisance and public health problems caused by unsanitary conditions in the “public areas” where the occupiers encamped, which were encroaching on the rights of residents and businesses in the affected areas.

Let’s take New York City, for example. Protesters began to “occupy” the quasi-public Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011. The park is technically privately owned but is dedicated to public use. The police did not immediately intervene, declaring that it was up to the owner, Brookfield Office Properties, to make and implement rules for the park’s use. A spokesperson for Brookfield expressed concern, but in fact the park owner took no steps at first to evict the occupiers from the park:

Zuccotti Park is intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public for passive recreation. We are extremely concerned with the conditions that have been created by those currently occupying the park and are actively working with the City of New York to address these conditions and restore the park to its intended purpose.

On October 6, 2011, Brookfield issued a statement which said, “Sanitation is a growing concern… the park has not been cleaned since Friday, September 16th and as a result, sanitary conditions have reached unacceptable levels.” Nevertheless, despite plenty of provocations by the occupiers against the police who were trying to keep the peace in the area, the occupiers were still permitted to stay put.

During the month that followed, Zuccotti Park, which the occupiers had taken over completely with large tents and the like, became a breeding ground of crime, including alleged rapes and other assaults. The New York occupiers shared such lawless behavior in common with their comrades in other cities across the country. Finally, in the early morning of November 15, 2011 – nearly two months after the occupation had started — the police moved in to clear out the occupiers from Zuccotti Park. The action was meant to halt the increasingly dangerous around-the-clock occupation of the park that prevented other members of the public from using it for recreational purposes. However, the occupiers were not barred from returning without their tents and sleeping bags to make their views known through peaceful demonstrations.

During the month that followed, Zuccotti Park, which the occupiers had taken over completely with large tents and the like, became a breeding ground of crime, including alleged rapes and other assaults. The New York occupiers shared such lawless behavior in common with their comrades in other cities across the country. Finally, in the early morning of November 15, 2011 – nearly two months after the occupation had started — the police moved in to clear out the occupiers from Zuccotti Park. The action was meant to halt the increasingly dangerous around-the-clock occupation of the park that prevented other members of the public from using it for recreational purposes. However, the occupiers were not barred from returning without their tents and sleeping bags to make their views known through peaceful demonstrations.

Here is how New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg explained why his patience with the occupiers had run out:

Unfortunately, the park was becoming a place where people came not to protest, but rather to break laws, and in some cases, to harm others. The majority of protesters have been peaceful and responsible. But an unfortunate minority has not been – and as the number of protesters has grown, this has created an intolerable situation. Protesters have had two months to occupy the park with tents and sleeping bags. Now they will have to occupy the space with the power of their arguments.

As usual, the United Nations has butt in where it does not belong. Moreover, while saying in their letter to Secretary of State Clinton that they were not prejudging the accuracy of the information they received indicating a violation of the occupiers’ rights, the UN special rapporteurs repeated over and over again the occupiers’ false accusations. They focused their letter on allegations that the police used disproportionate, unnecessary action and even violence to disperse or remove “peaceful” protesters, without even once acknowledging the possibility that some of the so-called “peaceful” protesters were infringing on other peoples’ rights and committing criminal acts.

The UN special rapporteurs do not understand what they were supposedly appointed to protect. Of course, that should be no surprise considering that they are reporting to the misnamed travesty known as the United Nations Human Rights Council. Freedom of speech and freedom of assembly do not mean that one group of demonstrators can completely take over, with permanent encampments, a space dedicated to public use and turn it into their own private law-free zone to do what they like, excluding other members of the public from using the space for other legitimate purposes.

The UN special rapporteurs’ nonsensical letter does not deserve a reply from the U.S. government other than to tell them to get their facts straight and mind their own business.

The leftie Huffington Post confirms this report, while (of course) taking a much more favorable view of the U.N. action.

This, of course, highlights the folly of Barack Obama’s obsession with working through multi-national bodies. Sometimes, doing that can be prudent. But often, such bodies are corrupt (the U.N. Human Rights Council), and sometimes they are motivated by things that are adverse to the interests of the U.S. (the EU). Either way, they lack moral authority, and the U.S. president has no obligation to sacrifice U.S. interests to a bunch of foreigners.

Embarrassed UN Panel Backs Away From Blundered Forecast on Global Warming Refugees

From the German weekly, Der Spiegel:

Six years ago, the United Nations issued a dramatic warning that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the UN has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.

It was a dramatic prediction that was widely picked up by the world’s media. In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations University declared that 50 million people could become environmental refugees by 2010, fleeing the effects of climate change.

But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: “It is not a UNEP prediction,” a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP’s website.

Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters have yet to materialize.

In October 2005, UNU said: “Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of ‘refugee.’”

It added that “such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions.”

In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache.

It has since disappeared from the Google cache, but we have retrieved both the map and the web page from Archive.org.

‘What Happened to the Climate Refugees?’

The UNEP spokesman said the map had been produced for a newspaper “based on various sources.” He said the map had been taken off the UNEP website “because it was causing confusion and making some journalists think UNEP was the source of such forecasts.”

Given the UN’s warnings of a tide of environmental refugees, the Asian Correspondent, a news and comment website, published an article this month titled “What Happened to the Climate Refugees?”

Scientists have been claiming for years that some 25 million people have already been displaced by adverse environmental conditions. Drought, storms and floods have always plagued parts of the world’s population. The environmentalist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, has been particularly bold in his forecasts. At a conference in Prague in 2005, he predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

“As far back as 1995 (latest date for a comprehensive assessment), these environmental refugees totalled at least 25 million people, compared with 27 million traditional refugees (people fleeing political oppression, religious persecution and ethnic troubles),” Myers said. “The environmental refugees total could well double between 1995 and 2010.”

“When global warming takes hold,” he added, “there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration, and by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Myers’ report may have been the basis for the UN statements in 2005.

Forecasts in Doubt

But Myers’ forecasts are controversial in scientific circles. Stephen Castles of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University contradicted the horror scenarios in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2007. Myers and other scientists were simply looking at climate change forecasts and counting the number of people living in areas at risk of flooding, said Castles, author of the “The Age of Migration.” That made them arrive at huge refugee numbers.

Castles said people usually don’t respond to environmental disasters, war or poverty by emigrating abroad. That appears to be confirmed by the behavior of victims of last month’s devastating earthquake and tusnami in Japan. Many survivors are returning to rebuild their ruined towns and villages.

The UNU statement from 2005 highlights the difficulties involved in predicting the impact of global warming. The Yemeni capital Sanaa was cited as an example of the threat of climate migration. Sanaa’s ground water was falling “by 6 meters a year and may be exhausted by 2010, according to the World Bank,” the statement said.

In 2010, the IRIN news agency, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported that Sanaa “may run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017.” Meanwhile the city’s population has increased: between 2004 and 2010, it expanded by 585,000 people to almost 2.3 million. Nevertheless, there is no sign of an exodus resulting from a shortage of water.

The same applies to other nations that were classified as particularly endangered on the UNEP map of the world, such as Bangladesh, the Cook Islands and Western Sahara. In these countries and others, the population numbers have increased, according to official data. Even the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu still has its 10,000 inhabitants, even though their relocation had already been planned. The reason may be that many low-lying Pacific islands are actually increasing in size despite the rise in ocean levels, because of a build-up caused by coral debris eroded from reefs and deposited on the islands by storms and sea currents.

Outlook for 2020

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which regularly issues a report summarizing the latest research, is vague when it comes to diagnosing environmental change. For example, the change in precipitation in the African Sahel zone has so far shown no clear trend. But the forecasts based on climate simulations for the next 90 years indicate drought for the region.

The UNEP spokesman said land degradation, the loss of forests and other environmental changes were accelerating, and that UNEP was concerned about the “impact such trends will have on lives and livelihoods and movements of people.”

Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said — for 2020.

True believers in anthropogenic global warming will insist that silly forecasts coming from a UN panel don’t really cast doubt on “the science” of the issue.

But of course, average citizens, even rather well-informed ones, don’t know the science, they only know the media hype, including media hype coming from the United Nations. Learning to discount this hype is an excellent first step toward sanity on the issue.

And unfortunately, the people who “know the science,” climate scientists, have shown themselves to be badly biased. Not only do they have a vested interest in global warming, they constitute a rather closed community with strong community norms. That’s what Climategate showed.

The fact that the true believers have acted like an Inquisition, threatening and punishing people who dissent, also does not engender confidence. Don’t people who are confident in their position usually seek to debate and engage, rather than stiffle opposing opinions?

George Orwell and the United Nations

From Heart, Mind & Strength blog, a bit of bureaucratic prose from the International Conference on Population Program of Action and Development (ICPD), and a translation into honest language.

(U.N. documents are never actually written in honest language.) First, from the bureaucrats:

We must, as well, foster equal partnerships and sharing of responsibilities in all areas of family life, including in sexual and reproductive life, and promote frank discourse on sexuality, including in relation to sexual health and reproduction. We must also acknowledge the direct link between population rates, fertility, and the ability to reach development outcomes.

Now, the translation:

We must be sure to further marginalize and stigmatize women who choose to become mothers, or who once becoming them, embrace this role, and desire to devote themselves to it full-time, and not necessarily earn an income while doing so. We must ensure that all women are forced from their homes, and their small children as early as possible - including breastfeeding mothers - so that they will earn at least 50% of the family income for political reasons and not for any reason based on the good of the woman, the good of the child, or the good of society. We must ensure that no one sees any good coming out of motherhood, and stamp out anyone who in the free exercise of their personal liberty might choose to believe that babies need their mothers and mothers need their babies (much less that both mothers and fathers have a unique and important role to play in the development of a young child - only fatherhood is more to be despised than motherhood). Believing in the goodness of motherhood - especially the desire to mother more than 1.2 children - is politically subversive and adversely affects those women in power who prefer to work outside the home and need all women to make that same choice in order to feel vindicated in it. We are “pro-choice” as long as all women make the choices that we ourselves prefer.

We must assume that women in developing countries desire the same things and have the same values as Western women and prefer to find their value in being economic producers and we must make sure that no woman feels fulfilled or valuable as “just” a mother.

We must remember that children - especially children of color or children in developing countries, who often come to the world in disconcertingly large numbers in our own view - are first and foremost a drain on the environment, and secondarily, a commodity that should be only created in the model ordered by wealthy Westerners, only if “wanted” and only if they can be produced economically, raised in what we regard, without any scientific evidence to support our requirements, in an ecologically-sustainable way, and if their numbers are strictly limited. Otherwise, because all children represent a threat to the adult material lifestyle of Western countries, which is the pinnacle of all good things (we believe), their lives should be seen as generally unimportant and mothers should be further stigmatized because they collaborate in the creation of this threat to our collective lifestyle.

We must ensure the universal adoption of the aforementioned goals and values by promoting at first voluntary, but then increasingly coercive methods of fertility control, combined with high-quality propaganda ensuring that all women see prospective motherhood as an unworthy pursuit and the threat to everyone’s well-being, especially their own, that we, the powers that be, believe it to be.

Another Academic 9/11 Conspiracy Promoter: Working for the U.N. This Time

From Fox News:

Critics are calling for the resignation of a U.N. official who publicly supports investigating theories that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were an “inside job.”

Richard Falk, the special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, investigates alleged Israeli violations of human rights law for the U.N.’s Human Rights Council.

But the former Princeton professor would also like to investigate whether “some sort of controlled explosion from within” destroyed the Twin Towers, he told FOXNews.com.

“I do think there are questions that haven’t been answered, questions about the way the buildings collapsed and the failure to heed a variety of signals that there was danger coming,” Falk said.

In 2004, Falk wrote the forward to “The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11,” a book written by David Ray Griffin, a Sept. 11 conspiracy theorist.

Griffin’s book argues that the Twin Towers may have been brought down by a “controlled demolition” — not by two airliners hijacked by Al Qaeda operatives — and that the Pentagon may not have been hit by a plane at all.

Griffin “doesn’t take a so-called conspiracy view and he raises questions that haven’t been answered,” Falk told FOXNews.com. “I think [the book] deserved to be published and I have no regrets about that.”

Falk said that while he supports alternative theories behind the World Trade Center attack, he doesn’t claim the U.S. government was responsible.

“I’m an agnostic on the issue,” he said.

This, of course, is equivalent to being agnostic on whether the holocaust happened.

But Bolton is hardly agnostic on the issue of Falk’s views.

“It’s just an example of the inmates running the asylum,” Bolton said. “It’s a particularly graphic example for Americans, but this is not an aberration — this is, unfortunately, typical of much of what goes on” at the U.N.

In an online article for the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research last year, Falk — prior to his appointment as an unbiased human rights investigator — compared Israeli actions in Gaza to the Nazi treatment of Jews. This may have led to his appointment as the rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, Bolton said.

“He was picked for a reason, and the reason is not to have an objective assessment — the objective is to find more ammunition to go after Israel,” Bolton said.

This is yet another piece of data to consider when leftist critics of the Bush Administration accuse it of a “go it alone” attitude toward international affairs, or of “ignoring world opinion.”

There are doubtless plenty of occasions when it it prudent and useful to work through the U.N., and when U.N. projects are helpful.

But the United Nations simply has no moral authority. It’s a bunch of bureaucrats in a big building on the East River who, like all bureaucrats, have their own agenda. The agenda might be ideological, it might be nationalistic, or it might simply be the protection of their own perks and privileges. Its agenda is not morally binding on the U.S. taxpayer, nor on the U.S. government.

U.N. Fiasco: Zimbabwe Holds Key Development Post

Blogger Greg St. Arnold is a Marquette student who has spent some time in Africa, so it’s logical that he would pick up a story that most Marquette students (and indeed most U.S. bloggers) will overlook.

But it’s a story with considerable international import.

Zimbabwe’s environmental minister will chair the United Nations Committee on Sustainable Development.

That’s right. Zimbabwe. A nasty dictatorship that is not developing sustainably -- or any other way. Quoting the Financial Times.

Enemies of the United Nations could not hope for a greater gift than the election of Zimbabwe to chair the UN commission on sustainable development. A more suitable role for one of President Robert Mugabe’s henchmen might be to head a commission for sustainable dictatorship: Zimbabwe’s lurches on despite the wilful destruction it has visited on its people.

In putting forward Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, for the chair, African governments have inflicted on themselves - as well as the UN - an astonishing blow. The commission, created in 1993, is the UN’s main forum for addressing the relationship between development and the environment. Africa’s turn to fill its chair - which rotates among regions - offered an opportunity to occupy the moral high ground.

[. . .]

In the UN forum, however, absurdity has prevailed. Despite the fact that some African governments are tired of the ill repute Mr Mugabe brings to the continent, its leaders are seemingly incapable of taking a collective decision to freeze him out.

The timing of the UN debacle is unfortunate for another reason. It sends a bad signal as talks start to re-capitalise the African Development Bank and replenish funds for the World Bank’s International Development Association. Even if the issues are separate, Africa has scored a spectacular own goal.

For at least a couple of generations, idealists held out the hope that the United Nations would bring peace and prosperity to the world.

The truth, of course, is that its brand of multinational politics isn’t any better than any other brand of politics. Sometimes bad people prevail. Often they can block any constructive action.

In this, the United Nations is no worse than the U.S. Congress.

But mystery is: why did anybody ever think it would be better?

Gays and the United Nations

Via Brian.Carnell.com, the fact that gay and lesbian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have been having a lot of trouble at the United Nations.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A U.N. committee rejected credentials of a Canadian gay and lesbian organization seeking consultative status with the United Nations and deferred the application of a similar body from Sweden, according to documents circulated on Friday.

Accreditation, which has been given to more than 2,000 groups, enables them to take part in U.N. conferences and offer advice in their field of expertise, such as human rights, health and humanitarian aid.

Envoys from the Canadian and Swedish U.N. missions criticized the U.N. Committee on Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs) at its Wednesday meeting, with Canada’s Nell Stewart expressing dismay at the panel’s “pattern of discrimination” in treating groups on sexual orientation.

The Canadian group was the Coalition of Gays and Lesbians of Quebec (Coalition Gaie et Lesbienne du Quebec), a national organization. The Stockholm group was the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights.

On the rejection of the Canadian group, the vote was 8 to 6. Against were Burundi, China, Egypt, Guinea, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia and Sudan. Voting in favor were Colombia, Israel, Peru, Romania, Britain and the United States.

Gosh, we thought the Bush Administration was a bunch of nasty homophobes.

Abstaining were Angola, India and Turkey.

The U.N. committee is a subsidiary of the U.N. Economic and Social Council, which can reverse the panel’s decisions. But with notable exceptions it agrees with the committee’s rulings.

British delegate Thomas Woodruffe told the panel that every NGO that met the criteria approved by the U.N. Economic and Social Council should be admitted in the fields of health, gender and human rights.

He noted that 100 groups had been accepted with varying viewpoints not all governments accepted.

Human rights groups are often turned down, particularly when they deal with dissidents in authoritarian countries. Even the influential New York-based Human Rights Watch was rejected in 1992 before being admitted a year and a half later.

Jewish groups also have a problem, and their applications are usually deferred or rejected. Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization that runs hospitals in Israel, succeeded after lengthy diplomatic fights in 2001.

In its decisions this week, the committee admitted the American Conservative Union and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the (U.S.) Southern Baptist Convention.

For politically correct leftists, this has to produce a lot of cognitive dissonance.

On the one hand, gays and lesbians are a politically correct victim group, and any opposition to their agenda is called “homophobia.”

On the other hand, the U.N. is supposedly a source of great moral authority. It represents the “world community.” Thus if the U.S. acts without U.N. sanction (invading Iraq, for example), it must be American that’s in the wrong.

The reality, of course, is that the U.N. has no particular moral authority. It is made up of highly self-seeking politicians, often representing extremely unsavory regimes.

And many of them aren’t too keen on homosexuality.

Brian Carnell suggests:

. . . the best bet for gay and lesbian groups would probably be to adopt anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic planks. Egypt, Pakistan and Qatar may not be thrilled by a gay and lesbian group, but if that group, say, argued that Jews were behind a worldwide plot against gays and lesbians, they’d probably win immediate approval.

That would present an interesting test: do they hate gays or Jews more?