Another cheer for Mary Robinson

I am not Mary Robinson‘s biggest fan. She spent a lot of time whining about John Bolton’s interference with the creation of a Human Rights Council, which she was sure would be so much better than ever before. Her anti-American tirades are just rehashes of the bilge that comes from her home in the Irish Labour Party. I think she is a sanctimonious prig, a bore, and a breathtakingly incompetent bureaucrat, even by UN standards. But I do not think she is an anti-Semite, no matter how inane her comments on Israel have been.

She offers proof of that, along with devastating condemnation of the UN, in an interview yesterday with Radio Free Europe.

Well, like Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty, and some of the other major human rights organizations, I did welcome the establishment of the Human Rights Council, and I felt that it had a real possibility of trying to break through sensitive political issues with a human rights leadership, which is never easy. The current president of the Human Rights Council, Ambassador [Luis Alfonso] de Alba of Mexico, is very committed, and it had a reasonably good start.
I think there were two things that worried me. One was when the war broke out in Lebanon, and you had the response of Israel, which is very questionable about being disproportionate, and raised issues of civilian casualties and displacement and destruction of property, and bridges, etc., which raises issues of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. But you also had Hizballah sending missiles into civilian populations in northern Israel.

I hoped that the Human Rights Council would act in a human rights way, and set up a commission of inquiry into both. Alas — and this was a problem of the previous Human Rights Commission — it only set up a commission of inquiry into what had happened in Israel, by the Israel forces. And that is not the human rights approach; that is the political approach. And if the Human Rights Council continues to taint human rights with the political approach, this time because of the Organization of the Islamic Conference countries…. They had the majority, they wanted to hit Israel, not do human rights work.

So that’s one very big problem. And then, I would very much agree with Human Rights Watch. How can you have a Human Rights Council that’s not absolutely outraged by what’s happening in Darfur? It’s getting worse by the day. There are women being raped, there are children dying, there are populations being displaced, there’s a militia that’s being supported in a complicit way by a government, and the fact that they didn’t bring it to our attention in a more urgent way, and have more urgent action…. The Security Council was also involved, but the Human Rights Council is the voice. “We the people” is the first three words of the charter.

I concede I never expected Mary Robinson to condemn the UN for its mistreatment of Mary Robinson.