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Friday, 22 March 2013

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 UNITED NATIONS Pvt. Ltd.

At the time this edition of the newspaper hits the newsstands, the resolution on Sri Lanka would have been introduced, on the floor of the UNHRC in Geneva.

But, what flows from that development, despite everything, will now be countered by the fact that the like-minded nations – Russia and China the giants included, have concluded that the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has exceeded its mandate on the report on Sri Lanka.

This is the grandest indictment yet on a UN system that’s broken down, polarized and serving the interests of a few member states, as opposed to the larger UN community of nations.

But, what’s more important is that this news confirms the inconvenient truth about the new means of keeping member countries on a leash controlled by the big powers.

The modus operandi is devious and transparently self-serving. UN bodies such as the UNHRC which have to be run by member consensus, have instead parceled out functions to the offices of appointed commissioners.

These people run their organizations through the agency of NGOs which are permitted to make their submissions on vital issues that deal with member nations. The NGOs are funded handsomely by these same countries that hold sway over the respective UN commissioners.

This is a fraud perpetrated on UN member states, and it is in very simple terms an instrument for neo-colonialism.

This ugly face of the UN system however has never been more apparent that this year, after the release of UN High Commissioner Navi Pillay’s ‘report.’

In letter and in spirit, this document has exceeded the mandate granted to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She started this charade by making public ‘advisory reports’ that were commissioned entirely for the OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) such as the Darusman report and the Petrie report.

This time she incorporated everything that was in the Darusman report into her own report and tried to palm that off as an acceptable and legitimate UN document.

Well, it isn’t - and this is the considered opinion not just of Sri Lanka but UN member nations such as Russia and China. ‘There is hole in your bucket - dear Pillay dear Pillay, there is hole in your bucket - there is a hole!’ . The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights might as well brush her teeth and do her morning ablutions to this refrain, because there is a gaping hole now deeper than the Grand Canyon due to her extra legal machinations to prostitute the UN system to serve the ends of her own masters, the dominant powers that seek to subvert the consensus nature of the UN system through the agency of the offices of the High Commissioners.

This is what the Commonwealth seeks to do as well, and to this end Sri Lanka’s wise refusal to try and block the creation of a Human Rights High Commissioner’s office in the Commonwealth is astute. But the Commonwealth is toothless and decorative, compared to the substantially empowered United Nations.

The United Nations must now demand for the rightful return of powers to member nations, from the ‘High Commissioner’s offices’ to which they have been outsourced.

And, absolutely, there should be nothing short of a demand for dismantling of the UN High Commissioner’s Office on Human Rights.

Sri Lanka should spearhead that demand, with the support of like-minded countries.

Any advisory work that is required for the proper functioning of the UN Human Rights Council should be managed by a consensus body that is comprised of representatives of member nations, and the obviously dangerous practice of making NGOs akin to UN member nations by granting these powers to make disruptive inputs against member states should be outlawed within the UN structure.

That will be a start in ensuring that the UN Human Rights Council is something more than a very big bad joke.
 

ONCE a dustman, always a dustman

The notorious propaganda video producer Callum Macrae’s bio-data includes a two year period he has worked as a dustman, the polite British description of a council worker who removes suburban garbage, before the typically crass Americanism “garbage collector” replaced this euphemism.

Full Story

The Numbers Game

Politics of Retributive Justice :

This study will be largely semi-empirical, and will focus on analysing numerical data gathered from the following sources. - Eyewitness Testimony – Culled from a large body of interviews conducted by the UTHR (J) team in 2009 with persons from the conflict zone. The UTHR(J) was one of the few organisations to interview people in Sri Lanka, and at same time cover a broad spectrum of views. They also provide valuable historical data through their informants in the Vanni about the state of affairs in the region from 2006 to 2009.

Full Story

Sri Lanka Rights Watch

Registering the contributions of courageous Tamils

I was deeply touched last week, at the Reconciliation Committee meeting in Manthai East, when Father James Pathinather expressed appreciation of a position I had put forward, and said that it had required courage. I also felt very humble, for nothing I had done could come close to the courage he himself had displayed, in April 2009, when he tried to protect LTTE combatants who had sought shelter in the Valayanamadam Church.

Full Story

 

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