Top five countries subject to UN human rights criticism in 2004:
First place:
Israel
Second place:
Sudan
Third place:
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Tied for Fourth place:
Cote d'Ivoire and United States of America
Now granted, given that any nation can speak at the UN some imbalance was inavitable, but how seriously can we take a body with a ranking like this? The United States tied with the Ivory Coast and ranked worse than, say, Liberia, Zimbabwe, or Congo-Brazzaville? Israel is really worse than Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen? This is absurd.
At the same time, strip away these absurdities, and there are still a lot of duties that the UN seems well suited to fill. The problem is that the body's limitations outstrip its strengths.
The idea of a UN still appeals to me, but part of me wants to start from scratch. I've advocated it before, and I will do so again -- I would like to see a body of liberal democratic nations with perhaps a bicameral structure that consists also of a lower house for aspiring liberal democracies. And the upper body should legitimately encourage nations to aspire both to gain membership in the uper circle and also to get into that lower house. think of it as a Premier league style relegation system. Sure, it sets apart a haves and have-nots kind of structure, but at least it is honest about it -- the UN does so as well, but the difference is that it does so while suckling at the teat of liberal democracies that it then condemns with no real regard for issues of justice or human rights, and worse yet, with an increasingly ineffectual presence in the world. And unlike the current UN, where Zimbabwe gets to judge the merits of other nations' human rights performance, the structure of this new global body would be based on merit, with the final arbiter being liberalization, openness, democratic values, and the like. And imagine if the body's largesse used political standards for providing development aid -- it would surely be a better approach than the World Bank and IMF often take, and would encourage nations to aspire toward democracy.
4 comments:
Derek, Cram:
You're in denial here, if you think there's some nasty commie conspiracy to diss the USA.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen join the USA as the only countries to have executed prisoners who committed a crime under the age of 18 since 1990.
Is that really company you want to be with?
And given that's the company you're in, can you blame the international community for noting so?
The United Nations certainly needs undoubted reforms. Above all, to be more legitimate, it needs to rely less on the USA for its funding, as whomever holds the purse strings plays the piper's tune. But I think you're barking up the wrong tree if you want to blame it for the USA's appalling human rights record.
{WARNING: No animals or children were left unharmed in the making of this pugilistic post).
Richard --
Sure, and I oppose the death penalty in toto, but I do think that a country's human rights record should be more than just a one issue litmus test. let's look at human rights in toto, and then listen yto anyone say with a straight face that the US belongs in the same discussion with Zimbabwe. Your comment is a sort of 'gotcha" perspective on human rights -- it does not really do much other than try to taint the US's record as a whole by looking at one onerous example. let's look at, say, treatment of journalists and opposition parties; food and others ervice delivery to all regions of a country independent of whether or not the ethnicity matches that of the ruling party; chopping off hands or limbs for what in most legal systems might not even be felony offenses; treatment of women; due process. Let's look at the entire record of a country.
The problem with your assertion of America's "appalling human rights record" (just how many Americans under the age of 18 have been executed, by the way) is that it is so hyperbolic that it almost closes off all possible discussion of legitimate human rights problems in the US. Why would I honestly even bother to engage someone who really cannot see the differences between the DRC and the US? i domn't think it makes one a hyperpatriot to expect a little bit of reasonable perspective on issues such as these.
dcat
Well, that's a fair point, and there's something rather tasteless in a league table of human rights attrocities anyway. My issue was more that it seemed curious to quibble about the USA's place on the list, rather than despair that it had earned such company at all.
Having yet to go through the thread in its entirety, I will say this about the perception of the death penalty as an "atrocity" ipso facto: I think it stems from its misuse in other countries for political means. Now granted, I wouldn't use this argument when it comes to executing juveniles and the mentally retarded, but I would when it comes to Timothy McVeigh, Adolf Eichman, and a whole host of others. The U.S. simply has not had a history of resorting to execution as a means of legitimizing political change, a slippery slope that can institutionalize murder or the threat thereof as a political lever. And in this respect, not only is it different from Saudi Arabia, Iran, et al., but also from the many otherwise enlightened Western democracies that have led the way in defining execution in just such a light.
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