Skeletons
The US stood almost alone yesterday as the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to set up a new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited body based in Geneva.
Ambassadors from around the world broke out in sustained applause when the UN vote was announced: 170-4, with three abstentions.
Human rights are as American as apple pie- why would the U.S. resist the creation of a U.N. council that is dedicated to protecting them?
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the assembled diplomats had missed a historic opportunity to help those most in need.
“We must not let the victims of human-rights abuses throughout the world think that UN member states were willing to settle for `good enough,’” Bolton said. “We must not let history remember us as the architects of a council that was a `compromise.’”
Nice words, those, but I don’t find them credible.
Coming from an administration with a human rights pedigree like this one:
Torturing prisoners in Abu Gharib
Torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay
and now, tampering with witnesses in a terrorism trial
I have to suspect that Bolton’s objection is really about looking for a way to keep this council from getting too interested in the skeletons in America’s closet.
