Human Rights Watch On Credibility
January 12, 2007 by Laura | Trackback URI
The irony of the Human Rights Watch criticizing the U.S. on human rights issues is breathtaking. If they spent a bit more time criticizing, say, North Korea, China, the situation in Darfur, the fact that the United Nations practically has “rape” as bullet point in the job description for Peacekeeper, and the fact that slavery is still in existence, as they do criticizing the U.S., they just might have more of an impact. Matthew 7:3-5 comes to mind.
A few quotes:
“This catastrophic path has left the United States effectively incapable of defending some of the most basic rights,” Roth said in the report [...]
“The trend is bleak, but not irreversible,” Roth wrote in an introduction to the report
Whew, that’s a relief. I guess there is hope after all. It’s not irreversible. HRW did at least have the decency to state the glaringly obvious:
The report’s introduction lamented the poor performance of the new U.N. Human Rights Council and called it hardly an improvement over its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights. Though the council’s central duty is to pressure highly abusive governments to change, it “has so far failed to criticize any government other than Israel,” in “a mockery of the high principles of its founding.”
To use adjectives like “catastrophic” and “bleak” when describing the admittedly imperfect, but still the most free nation on the planet, and proffer some mild criticism for nations where people are enslaved, murdered, starved and subjugated by dictators is patently ridiculous. They state that we have lost credibility, but Human Rights Watch reports read more like Onion parodies these days. It’s a disgrace.
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if you spent a bit more time perusing Human Rights Watch’s website you’d find that the organization does plenty of criticizing of the most abusive countries in the world. Roth’s argument was about leadership in promoting human rights, and the human rights record that that requires.
Your comment about rape as a peacekeeper requirement is so inaccurate as to be offensive.
Christoph, I’m sure that there are UN Peacekeepers who are good, honorable men. But it is well documented that rapes by Peacekeepers - including child rapes - and sex trafficking are occurring on such a scale, and continuing to go unpunished, that some snark is justifiable.
And describing the human rights situation in the United States as “bleak” is patently ridiculous.