Ronan Farrow Says Barack Obama Should Be Careful About Lending Legitimacy to the United Nations Human Rights Council - WSJ.com

Ronan Farrow Says Barack Obama Should Be Careful About Lending Legitimacy to the United Nations Human Rights Council - WSJ.com: "Last week the Obama administration announced its intention to seek membership in a body America has for years shunned: the United Nations Human Rights Council. It is perhaps the starkest illustration yet of what officials have billed as a 'new era of engagement,' and it was breathlessly hailed as a toppling of Bush-era isolationist tactics.

But the Human Rights Council is far from the symbol of positive engagement proponents of the decision would like it to be. Joining plunges the U.S. headlong into one of the most notorious quagmires in international politics. American officials will have to walk a razor's edge between instigating reform and legitimizing the Council's colorful, often sinister, history.

The Council's most recent session saw the body voting to end its mandate to investigate the Democratic Republic of the Congo, even as that nation lurches into ethnic bloodshed. A Pakistani resolution against 'defamation of religions' passed with ease despite being universally decried by human rights groups as a thinly veiled effort to curtail freedom of expression and suppress minority sects.
The news was unsurprising for anyone familiar with the Council. The body has declined to issue a single condemnation of Sudan for its ethnic cleansing in Darfur. As fresh violence convulsed Darfur last year, the Council responded by dismissing the team of experts tasked with monitoring the region, then disregarding reports from a fact-finding mission that implicated the Sudanese government in torture, rape and mass murder."


Did anyone expect anything less from Him????