The Warped Mirror: Human rights at 60

As many of the commentaries written to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10th have highlighted, the document was drafted at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II were still a fresh trauma. Back then, it was perhaps hard to imagine that human rights would once be cynically employed to play politics.

But six decades on, it's even fashionable in some political circles to downplay the most deadly conflict since World War II and argue that, instead of wasting time and effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Congo - where war and violence have claimed more than 5 million lives since 1988 and as many as 45,000 people still die every month of war-related causes - the international community should rather focus on the suffering that Israel is supposedly imposing on Gaza. 

Indeed, when it comes to human rights in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nothing is too preposterous in the year in which the UN proudly marks the 60th anniversary of its Declaration of Human Rights. Earlier this year, the UN's Human Rights Council (UNHRC) saw it fit to appoint a man who thinks Israel should be accused of committing a "holocaust" against the Palestinians as a "special investigator" on Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories.  Of course, it is not only the UNHRC and its "special investigator" that constantly worry about the Palestinians, since there is also a UN agency dedicated solely to the needs of Palestinians: UNRWA, which is currently gearing up to mark its 60th anniversary next December and which happens to be the largest UN agency in terms of the number of staff employed - between 25,000 and 30,000, of which 99 percent are Palestinians. 

Yet another example of the lack of any sense of restraint in using the issue of human rights for political pandering was provided when the President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, tried to prevent Israel's ambassador, Professor Gabriela Shalev, from speaking at a special commemorative plenary session marking the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

Obviously, the idea of listening to a speech by Israel's UN ambassador couldn't appeal much to a man who, back in September, had a warm embrace for the Iranian President after he heard him deliver his version of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to the UN General Assembly.

Unfortunately for the General Assembly President, European representatives rejected his attempt to prevent the Israeli UN ambassador from delivering her address, but Brockmann wouldn't give up so easily and announced that he insisted to then also invite a representative of the Arab bloc to give a speech.  It's safe to assume that Brockmann's move was not motivated by any desire to learn about the state of human rights in the Arab world - but as it happens, a new report about this subject has just been published by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS). The institute’s main conclusion is "that the status of human rights in the Arab region in 2008 has increasingly worsened."

With regard to the Palestinian territories, the CIHRS report decries "the continuing criminal practices of the Israeli Occupational Forces", but, unusually, the report also points to "the bloody internal conflict between Hamas and Fatah", noting "that for the first time, the number of Palestinians killed as a result of internal fighting has exceeded the number killed as a result of Israeli attacks. Fatah and Hamas have outdone one another in their maltreatment of prisoners from the other side, engaging in the worst types of abusive practices."

Perhaps even more unusual than this open criticism of Palestinian human rights abuses is the report's claim that Arab states are not only becoming more repressive at home, but that the increased internal repression "has been accompanied by earnest attempts to export increasing domestic repression outside the Arab region through the international mechanisms of the UN and the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Initiative." 

That these efforts to "export" repression are considerably more successful than one would hope on the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights is vividly illustrated by a report about "Islam's Challenges To 'Universal Human Rights'" on the Radio Free Europe website.

But the sorry state of the discourse about human rights is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by a bit of googling, because this arguably shows where people think they should worry about human rights abuse - here are the results I got: