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 Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @09:47AM (30 children)
This should not come as a surprise considering that the same UN Human Rights Council has been headed by Saudi Arabia.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 11 2020, @11:57AM (29 children)
And yet some retards still get all cranky when you tell them the UN are clown shoes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aiwarrior on Saturday April 11 2020, @12:06PM (18 children)
When the US did Guantanamo and the extraordinary renditions everybody got legitimacy to do whatever they wanted. Then add Donald Trump, as everything goes and this seems natural. What a stupid world we live in.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 11 2020, @01:50PM (17 children)
You know, it really gives me a chuckle when folks equate Gitmo with the shit that goes on as a matter of course in much of the rest of the world in order to shoot down the moral high ground of the US. Aside from being fallacious about any perceived bad acts rendering any moral statement made by the actor null, it also shows them willing to equate stubbing your toe to having said toe flayed, salted, and then cut off for the sake of their narrative.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @02:05PM (2 children)
Everybody is an individual. Only the people outside care about the statistics.
When you torture one guy, to that guy you are the worst torturer in the world. It doesn't matter that some other bastard tortured 100 people. Guantanamo might be a joke to you comparing it to other regimes, but to the people in it being abused, it is still torture and it is still wrong.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by khallow on Saturday April 11 2020, @03:09PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 15 2020, @06:22PM
True, but it is also the best in the world.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Saturday April 11 2020, @02:09PM (8 children)
Buzz, whaddya say we split the difference?...
No one is innocent. Nobody has the moral high ground. If somebody does we're talking in millimeters.
How's that sound to you?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @01:37PM
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @02:47PM (6 children)
Fairly nonsensical. I get why you want to take that position but it's not a valid position if you're looking to have people be less shitty to each other. You absolutely can judge degrees of being shitty to your fellow human beings and there is no valid reason for allowing the worst offenders of human rights abuses to even be on a human rights committee, much less lead it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Sunday April 12 2020, @08:53PM (5 children)
All I'm sayin' is "He who is without sin cast the stone."
Happy Easter, Mr Buzz.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Sunday April 12 2020, @08:55PM
Oops. The first stone.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @10:29PM (3 children)
You're confusing commuting punishment with accepting the fox's application for a henhouse guarding job. One is mercy and compassion, the other is being a bloody fool.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Monday April 13 2020, @07:38AM (1 child)
And you're compartmentalizing.
To be perfectly honest, I can see your point (fox guarding the henhouse). That was also my initial reaction. I even agree with you!
Then I thought about how this present situation arose some decades ago and instead of refusing to have dealings with governments which have such a miserable record regarding human rights, America's/Western Europe's love of cheap plastic toys has turned a blind eye. Then I thought about just the last two decades regarding American human rights affairs (Guantanamo, Assange, Patriot Act, FISA, Snowden, airport security theatre, cellular triangulation...oh, the list goes on and on). And this is just an extemporaneous short list of publicly known subjects. Any argument is cognitive dissonance. They're all "oranges in a tube sock" but you just wanna see blood.
"We" put China, Saudi Arabia, [name your "enemy" here] in the place of power they occupy today, knowing full well how these governments operate in terms of human rights, in exchange for cheap plastic toys and the prime materials to make cheap plastic toys. And now we're crying "fox guarding the henhouse"?
Pick your manual: 1984 or Brave New World...or make a Venn diagram.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday April 13 2020, @02:30PM
No, I'm really not. I'm just calling bullshit on the whole "you did something bad, though not remotely as bad, so you can never speak out about atrocities" argument. You do not have to be perfect to say something is wrong. But if you're one of the most wrong nations in the world, you do not belong in charge of whatever it is you're wrong on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Monday April 13 2020, @07:49AM
OFFTOPIC: and now I get the "boss in your underwear" joke! 🤣🤣🤣
Hey...it was new to me!
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by barbara hudson on Saturday April 11 2020, @04:48PM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @02:47PM (2 children)
And clear out their sinuses.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:06PM (1 child)
Maybe you are confusing US water boarding with how India rubs peppers into the victim's eyes.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:32PM
Nah, it's basically an industrial strength nepi pot. Just hope they thought to use distilled water for the amoeba factor.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Saturday April 11 2020, @01:37PM (9 children)
Any grouping of people, hence any organisation, will have a number of clown shoes in them; that's just statistics. That doesn't mean that organisation itself is useless.
(Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 11 2020, @01:51PM (6 children)
If the clown shoes are allowed to run things, it absolutely does, yes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @03:39PM (1 child)
Remind me who are the clowns?
"The CIA, with significant support from Britain and other allies, would kidnap people and fly them to countries where they could be tortured. Detainees spent months or years in secret prisons beyond the rule of law. In the dungeons of Gaddafi, Mubarak or Assad they were beaten and hung from the walls, and in some cases had their genitals cut with a scalpel."
"Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that Secretary Rice is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop."
"First the ... government denied renditions ever took place... [t]hen in 2008 it finally admitted the truth. Now, years later, documents relating to a key period have reportedly been accidentally destroyed when they were soaked in water."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @02:49PM
You did something way less bad so you're not allowed to call industrial scale atrocities bad? Do fuck off.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:10PM (3 children)
Ironic given who the US president is.
Shirley the Republican party could have done better.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:33PM (2 children)
Did you see the 2016 primaries? They couldn't. And don't call me Shirley.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday April 12 2020, @07:34PM (1 child)
I don't vote in their primary. But I thought any one of those clowns would be a better choice than Trump.
I didn't like GW Bush. But I would gladly have him back in a heartbeat over Trump. At least he had some sense of honor, decency and a partly working moral compass. Not that I'm trying to praise the guy as a great man.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday April 12 2020, @10:34PM
I watched the first few debates. You're incorrect. Every one of them would have been worse from a generic Democrat's perspective, a generic Republican's perspective, and from my perspective off where all three of us sane folks live.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 12 2020, @03:18PM (1 child)
Note: I'm not going to count their support of "Modern Art" as a "good".
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Sunday April 12 2020, @06:12PM
They could tell you, but then they'd have to subject you to AT&T service.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 11 2020, @10:27AM (8 children)
It was the goal of China to dominate the US militarily, economically, and politically, within twenty years. At this point, they are about 15 years behind, but they continue to work on that goal. They pretty much have the economics, if they can only get more of the world to end dependence on the US$ for trade. Militarily, they've made tremendous inroads. And, this item just puts them a little closer to the political goal.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday April 11 2020, @12:00PM
Economically ain't gonna happen while they got their currency tied so closely to the dollar. And if they untie it they lose the protection from the value of their currency rising, which means their products become more expensive to the world.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @03:43PM (5 children)
Personally I can't see any prison population outperforming a free nation (given similar starting point). Think of the productivity when moral is shit and your hate your bosses versus when you are doing something you are interested in for your own benefit.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday April 11 2020, @04:00PM (3 children)
I don't see China as a prison, nor, I suspect, do the Chinese. Their culture was vastly different from ours, long before the Communist party came along. It would be nice if some Chinese nationals were to happen along, and tell us how they view things. Unfortunately, the only ones likely to show up are either malcontents, or working for the government. That Great Firewall helps to ensure that.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @06:15PM
Grandparent was referencing the US, you moron, Runaway. Particularly Arkansas.
(Score: 4, Informative) by FunkyLich on Sunday April 12 2020, @12:25AM (1 child)
They actually don't. I have lived there for 4 years, that was 20 years ago. They were very patriotic, proud of their country. Didn't want to speak much of politics, but they all worked a lot for competition about most anything is very high there. They were very good at barter negotiations, you needed to be very careful when buying stuff or you'd end up almost always buying something for a higher than usual price. (But I have seen that happen a lot also in Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, Uganda, Egypt, Greece, Albania, Brazil).
Their culture IS vastly different from the western culture. They are not very keen to defy tradition and they do follow instructions from a leader much easier than what we, the westerners, do. This is not only a chinese thing, but most of the asian have the same: India, China, Korea(s), Japan, Phillippines, Malaysia.
It is also the chinese way to just smile and keep on doing whatever they are doing while someone mocks them. For wisdom, all they need to do is look back into their own immense land and history, with so many wars and events happening locally to put half of the entire World to shame. "The wind will always blow, only a food tries to stop it". They'd shake their heads and then keep on working and improving their own country like they have done in these last decades.
And believe me, the China of today is several times better in everything compared to the China of 2000. Which in turn was orders of magnitude better than the China of 1980.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday April 12 2020, @04:08AM
Have you read Liu Cixin's books? The stories he writes seem to give you pretty decent "atmosphere" of Chinese life. His Three Body Problem relates some of the early Chi-com history. I get the idea that his stories, much like Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens, aren't factual, but almost certainly convey life as it was.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday April 11 2020, @06:12PM
Are you talking about the US? Prison industries don't need to be more efficient, because they are subsidized.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Saturday April 11 2020, @04:31PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @10:38AM
"Fox to guard the hen house"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @10:54AM (1 child)
He who has the gold, makes the rules.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday April 11 2020, @11:29PM
The Jewish middle-managers who sold out the livelihoods of their home countries for a bit more profit, make the rules. But not for long...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @12:16PM (1 child)
Now for the rest of the UN.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Monday April 13 2020, @01:15AM
No. Pete went deaf on his own.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @03:48PM
Influential? Really? If I'm a dictator and I want to round up a bunch of people and shoot them, what are they going to do? Send me an angry letter? If my country has oil and trades with with the USA, will they stop us from looking the other way? Influential??? Over who, and in time for any action before a bunch of people get killed? And really, who decides what's a human right anyway? In some countries women are chattel and slaves "deserve it". In some countries, you can sleep with whoever you want, and in others that's an abomination. Is the right to life even universal? There's a spartan tribe in the Amazon where they all off themselves around 30. If the right to life is universal, shouldn't we be doing something to change that culture? Oh, but that'd be like yanking hijabs off Muslims, or would it be like forcing us to wear them? Face it. Nobody agrees on "human rights". Ultimately, it's decided with guns if it matters but more often it's just a pretext for war fought on some other basis. Influential. Whatever.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @05:09PM
To call on the experts in implementing it, is only natural.