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from the If-you-can't-beat-'em,-join-'em-and-change-'em? dept.
China Appointed to Influential UN Human Rights Council Panel
Last week, China was appointed to a seat on the Consultative Group of the United Nations Human Rights Council. Jiang Duan, an official at the Chinese Mission in Geneva, was nominated and confirmed by the Asia regional grouping and will hold the seat until March 2021. The appointment places China on an influential panel that oversees candidate recommendations for UN human rights experts and is likely to raise some concerns given China's less than perfect record on human rights issues.
As China has become more integrated in international organizations over the past 40 years or so, particularly within UN bodies and agencies, the scope of issue areas it is willing to not only engage with but also shape has expanded.
[...] The Consultative Group, the body to which China was just appointed, is charged with recommending candidates to fill positions according to the mandates of the Special Procedures, the Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Expert Mechanism on the Right of Development. The panel consists of five ambassadors, each representing the five UN regional groups, and facilitates the appointment of experts on issues of freedom of speech and religion; water and sanitation; housing; food; health; poverty; and conditions in countries such as Cambodia, Iran, Myanmar, and North Korea.
[...] In recent years, China has actively submitted proposals to the UNHRC as a member, albeit not without pushback. These resolutions have been challenged for their framing of human rights issues and the right to development within a state-centric approach, privileging the sovereignty of states over groups of people and communities. Experts have been outspoken about the implications of such proposals, raising concern that an overemphasis on dialogue and consensus might dilute the commitments to transparency and accountability. Separately, in July 2019, two coalitions of states sent competing letters to the UNHRC about China's Xinjiang policies — one criticizing China for its massive detention program and the other opposing the "politicization" of human rights issues and supporting Chinese counterterrorism and deradicalization efforts. More recently, there has been heightened international outcry about human rights in China amid the harsh measures Beijing put in place to combat the coronavirus.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 11 2020, @02:37PM
Gotta disagree with you here. GP mentioned renditions. That mostly meant kidnapping "suspects", taking them to some third country's territory, and "interrogating" them, outside of the jurisdiction of any US court. There have been a large number of incredible reports about the torture, which I can shrug off easily enough. But, there have also been credible reports of torture.
The Shrub's administration admitted to waterboarding, readily enough. And Dickless Cheny spent an extraordinary amount of effort justifying torture. Those two facts lend even more credibility to those credible reports about renditions. Those two fuckwads did more to damage the US' reputation around the world than any five president's administrations before them.
The Guardian has a reasonable enough article on the matter, from the British perspective - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/11/7-things-diego-garcia-rendition-flights-documentaton-water-damage [theguardian.com]
Diego Garcia isn't unique, either. There are other out-of-the-way places where flights could stop for fuel, transfer prisoners, or whatever, entirely out of sight of the media. I flew into and out of one of those places, and it made a helluva impression on me, and all the other passengers.
Funny, how Bush and Blair were so ready to "welcoming him back to "civilised" society,". For extremely warped definitions of "civilised", I suppose their welcome might be appropriate.
For unexplainable reasons, I took all of that shit a little personally.