Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

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Nikki Hailey’s human rights op-ed

U.S. ambassador to the UN writes at the WaPo: The U.N. Human Rights Council whitewashes brutality

The president of Venezuela, whose government shoots protesters in the street, recently thanked the international community for its “universal vote of confidence” in that country’s commitment to human rights.

The Cuban deputy foreign minister, whose government imprisons thousands of political opponents, once said Cuba has historic prestige “in the promotion and protection of all human rights.”

How can these people get away with saying such things? Because they have been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose members are — on paper — charged with “upholding the highest standards” of human rights.

On paper only, since

Venezuela is a member of the council despite the systematic destruction of civil society by the government of Nicolás Maduro through arbitrary detention, torture and blatant violations of freedom of the press and expression. Mothers are forced to dig through trash cans to feed their children. This is a crisis that has been 18 years in the making. And yet, not once has the Human Rights Council seen fit to condemn Venezuela.

Cuba’s government strictly controls the media and severely restricts the Cuban people’s access to the Internet. Thousands are arbitrarily detained each year, with some political prisoners serving long sentences. Yet Cuba has never been condemned by the council; it, too, is a member.

Read the whole thing.

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Venezuela: Lopez, the lying prosecutor, and the UN

As you may recall, last September dissident leader Leopoldo López was sentenced to 13+ years in jail following a sham trial. He was jailed on February 18, 2014.

Now the case’s prosecutor, Franklin Nieves, is saying the case was 100% fabricated:
Case against Venezuelan opposition leader fabricated, ex-prosecutor says 

Ex-prosecutor Franklin Nieves, who fled Venezuela last week, told CNN en Español on Tuesday that “100% of the investigation was invented” around false evidence in a sham prosecution allegedly orchestrated by President Nicolas Maduro and Diosdado Cabello, the head of the National Assembly.
. . .
The former prosecutor said that “after examining each and every piece of evidence it was shown that this person had at no point made even a single call to violence.”

It would make for a Capt. Louis Renault moment, but the actual surprise is that Nieves confessed.

The WSJ has the motive behind the confession (emphasis added):
Venezuela Prosecutor Franklin Nieves Says Opposition Leader’s Trial Was a Sham. Leopoldo López’s conviction last month was ordered from above, prosecutor says after escaping to Miami

“Leopoldo López is innocent,” Mr. Nieves said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, his first since fleeing Venezuela late last week and releasing a video saying the proceedings were bogus. His about-face is causing a political uproar in Caracas and a thorny problem for the embattled administration of President Nicolás Maduro, the heir to the late populist Hugo Chávez.

Dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief, Mr. Nieves apologized for his actions as the prosecutor who detained Mr. López and jointly supervised his trial. “From my heart, I want to ask for forgiveness from Venezuela, Leopoldo López’s, López’s wife, the López family, and especially from their children,” he said.

After claiming they were heading for a vacation in Aruba, Mr. Nieves brought his wife and two daughters with him to Miami, where the family is seeking asylum in the U.S.,

Here’s Nieves’s recorded statement (in Spanish),

The WSj points out,

But it is one thing for human rights groups to say the trial was a farce, and quite another for the prosecutor to admit it. The statements by the prosecutor, a brief version of which surfaced in a video released last week, have underscored the lack of an independent judiciary in Venezuela.

“The lack of independence and autonomy of the judiciary from political power is one of the weakest points of democracy in Venezuela,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent arm of the Organization of American States, said in its 2014 annual report released in May of this year.

That same year, the United Nations Committee Against Torture found that some 62% of judges in Venezuela are in temporary posts, meaning they can be removed at the will of the state, raising concerns over their impartiality.

Not that such thing matters at the UN;

UN Watch today urged member states of the UN General Assembly to oppose the re-election on Wednesday of egregious human rights abusers Venezuela, Pakistan and UAE to the UN Human Rights Council, as well as Burundi, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Kyrgyzstan, Lao, and Togo, due to widespread criticism of these governments’ violations of fundamental freedoms.

Sure enough, Venezuela was elected to the UN Human Rights Council yesterday, proving once more that the U.N. is immune to irony (and ridicule).

At the blogs:
Caracas Chronicles: Nieves the Victim. Leopoldo López’s prosecutor, Franklin Nieves, wallows in self-pity as he tells the world he participated in a plot to fake the evidence used against Lopez.

Venezuela News and Views: The banality of evil, Caracas style

Breitbart: VENEZUELA: LEOPOLDO LÓPEZ PROSECUTOR DEFECTS TO U.S., CASE WAS ‘100% FALSE’

HACER: #Venezuela Fiscal del caso de Leopoldo López admite que usó pruebas falsas bajo presión



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Ecuador whines at the UN Human Rights Council

Ecuador Times reports that

Today in the Twenty-sixth Session of the Human Rights Council, the Chevron case and its impact on the Ecuadorian Amazon will be submitted. The meeting will be held in Geneva and will finish on June 27.

I doubt that Ecuador will start its presentation with Judge Kaplan’s 500-page decision against Donziger (via Business Roundtable), where Kaplan found not only Donziger but the entire Lago Agrio plaintiff team guilty of fraud,

[Donziger] and the Ecuadorian lawyers he led corrupted the Lago Agrio case. They submitted fraudulent evidence. They coerced one judge, first to use a court-appointed, supposedly impartial, “global expert” to make an overall damages assessment and, then, to appoint to that important role a man whom Donziger hand-picked and paid to “totally play ball” with the [Lago Agrio plaintiffs]. They then paid a Colorado consulting firm secretly to write all or most of the global expert’s report, falsely presented the report as the work of the court-appointed and supposedly impartial expert, and told half-truths or worse to U.S. courts in attempts to prevent exposure of that and other wrongdoing. Ultimately, the [Lago Agrio plaintiff] team wrote the Lago Agrio court’s Judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge to rule in their favor and sign their judgment. If ever there were a case warranting equitable relief with respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it.

However, I fully expect that “ethically diverse demonstrators” may find employment during the HRC junket, as long as there’s any media willing to watch them.


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The UN Human Rights Council beclowns itself

Along with Cuba, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam win seats on UN Human Rights Council

New York-based Human Rights Watch said five candidate nations — China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Algeria — have refused to let U.N. investigators visit to check alleged abuses.

If Cuba is not included among those five, it must be because the U.N. investigators have not asked.

They would have their work cut out for them.

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Right on time for the Jewish holidays, Fidel Castro opens his mouth

The Jewish High Holy Days start today, and out of the blue the nearly-restored Caudillo comes out, gives an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg, and says,
Fidel to Ahmadinejad: ‘Stop Slandering the Jews’

The kindness of Fidel’s heart made him say that?

Hardly.

As Goldberg himself notes,

Castro opened our initial meeting by telling me that he read the recent Atlantic article carefully, and that it confirmed his view that Israel and America were moving precipitously and gratuitously toward confrontation with Iran. This interpretation was not surprising, of course: Castro is the grandfather of global anti-Americanism, and he has been a severe critic of Israel. His message to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, he said, was simple: Israel will only have security if it gives up its nuclear arsenal, and the rest of the world’s nuclear powers will only have security if they, too, give up their weapons.

Note how it’s Israel and America who Castro says are “moving precipitously and gratuitously toward confrontation with Iran”, as if Iran was just sitting there growing fields of lavender to make sachets for little old ladies to put in their dressers.

Fidel, playing the wise sage for a credulous world audience, came out and criticized Iran,

He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.

And so did Goldberg.

Why this new Fidel? Castro apologist Julia Sweig explained it all to Jeff,

After this first meeting, I asked Julia to explain the meaning of Castro’s invitation to me, and of his message to Ahmadinejad. “Fidel is at an early stage of reinventing himself as a senior statesman, not as head of state, on the domestic stage, but primarily on the international stage, which has always been a priority for him,” she said. “Matters of war, peace and international security are a central focus: Nuclear proliferation climate change, these are the major issues for him, and he’s really just getting started, using any potential media platform to communicate his views. He has time on his hands now that he didn’t expect to have. And he’s revisiting history, and revisiting his own history.”

Revising history, is more like it.

And if it brings US tourists to spend money in the island-prison, why not?

Trust me on this: this new and improved Fidel will sell well all over. After all, isn’t Cuba on the UN Human Rights Council already?

I’m talking about this in today’s podcast at 11:30AM.

Related:
Today’s “WTF? moment” goes to Fidel Castro VIDEO, with special thanks to commenter ryukyu for the link.

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U.N. Elects Iran to Commission on Women’s Rights

Two days after boobquake…

U.N. Elects Iran to Commission on Women’s Rights

Without fanfare, the United Nations this week elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.”

Just days after Iran abandoned a high-profile bid for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, it began a covert campaign to claim a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women, which is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women,” according to its website.

Buried 2,000 words deep in a U.N. press release distributed Wednesday on the filling of “vacancies in subsidiary bodies,” was the stark announcement: Iran, along with representatives from 10 other nations, was “elected by acclamation,” meaning that no open vote was requested or required by any member states — including the United States.

The US, asleep at the wheel.

Shame.

(h.t The Corner)

UPDATE
The U.N. Is A Drag On The Body Politic

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U.S. to Join U.N. Human Rights Council

According to the Washington Post, U.S. to Join U.N. Human Rights Council

The Obama administration decided Tuesday to join the U.N. Human Rights Council, reversing a decision by the Bush administration to shun the United Nations’ premier rights body to protest the influence of repressive states, according to U.N. diplomats and rights activists.

The United States will participate in elections in May for one of three seats on the 47-member council, joining a slate that includes Belgium, Norway and New Zealand. New Zealand has offered to step aside to allow the United States to run unchallenged, according to a U.S. official.

As Anne Bayefsky put it, the current administration is following A Foreign Policy of Obsequiousness.

Ralph Peter has a list itemizing O’s foreign failures. Add this one to the list.

Related reading:
The Sword of Islam, the Pen of the UN

Here’s the roster of UN Human Rights Council members.

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