U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Navanethem Pillay has agreed to consider the proposal, according to the OIC, a bloc of Islamic nations.
Friday, September 24, 2010
By Patrick Goodenough
(CNSNews.com) – The Quran-burning controversy in the United States has prompted the Islamic bloc at the United Nations to revive its call for the U.N. to set up an “international monitoring mechanism” to track incidents of “Islamophobia.”
Five years after establishing an “Islamophobia Observatory” of its own, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) is now calling on the U.N.’s top human rights official to set up a comparable body at her Geneva office. According to the OIC, human rights commissioner Navanethem Pillay has agreed to consider the proposal.
At the U.N. Human Rights Council this week, OIC members are also seeking support for a resolution condemning Florida pastor Terry Jones’ abortive call to burn copies of the Quran on September 11.
Introduced by Pakistan on behalf of the OIC, the text condemns “the recent call by an extremist group to organize a ‘Burn a Koran Day’” and says it was among “instances of intolerance, discrimination, profiling and acts of violence against Muslims occurring in many parts of the world.”
When it comes to a vote -- before the Council’s session in Geneva ends next Friday -- the measure almost certainly will pass. The OIC controls more than one-third of the Council’s seats, and its resolutions are routinely backed by non-Muslim allies such as China, Russia, Cuba and South Africa.
Moreover, Western democracies which usually oppose OIC “Islamophobia” and “religious defamation” measures at the HRC – on freedom of expression grounds – will not likely do so in this case, having strongly condemned Jones’ threats earlier this month.
U.S. ambassador to the HRC Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe wrote to Pillay in late August, deploring Jones’ threatened action and telling her that the U.S. “supports the full use of your office and moral authority to speak out against intolerance and instances of hate speech where they occur.”
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Showing posts with label united nations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label united nations. Show all posts
Friday, September 24, 2010
Friday, April 24, 2009
UN torture envoy: US must prosecute Bush lawyers
By VERONIKA OLEKSYN – 15 minutes ago
VIENNA (AP) — The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.
Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.
"That's exactly what I call complicity or participation" to torture as defined by the convention, Nowak said at a news conference. "At that time, every reasonable person would know that waterboarding, for instance, is torture."
Nowak, an Austrian law professor, said it was up to U.S. courts and prosecutors to prove that the memos were written with the intention to incite torture.
Nowak and other experts said that a failure to investigate and prosecute when there was evidence of torture left those responsible vulnerable to prosecutorial action abroad.
"If it should turn out ... that the (U.S.) government and its authorities are not willing to prosecute those where we have enough evidence that they instigated or committed torture, then there is also an obligation on all other 145 states" party to the convention to exercise universal jurisdiction, Nowak said.
LINK
VIENNA (AP) — The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects, the U.N.'s top anti-torture envoy said Friday.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama left the door open to prosecuting Bush administration officials who devised the legal authority for gruesome terror-suspect interrogations. He had previously absolved CIA officers from prosecution.
Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal.
"That's exactly what I call complicity or participation" to torture as defined by the convention, Nowak said at a news conference. "At that time, every reasonable person would know that waterboarding, for instance, is torture."
Nowak, an Austrian law professor, said it was up to U.S. courts and prosecutors to prove that the memos were written with the intention to incite torture.
Nowak and other experts said that a failure to investigate and prosecute when there was evidence of torture left those responsible vulnerable to prosecutorial action abroad.
"If it should turn out ... that the (U.S.) government and its authorities are not willing to prosecute those where we have enough evidence that they instigated or committed torture, then there is also an obligation on all other 145 states" party to the convention to exercise universal jurisdiction, Nowak said.
LINK
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Journalist Who Exposes U.N. Corruption Disappears From Google
By Michael Y. Park
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331106,00.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331106,00.html
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