Monitoring the Monitors
As reported in last week’s Friday Fax, Alliance Defending Freedom took the floor recently at a General Assembly forum on how to reform United Nations Treaty Bodies, calling on the Treaty Bodies not to usurp functions that do not rightfully belong to them. These treaty monitoring bodies, also called “Compliance Committees,” are generally empowered to [...]
Freedom of Speech and LGBT Rights: Many Traditions Don’t Agree With Homosexuality
In recent years same-sex marriage proponents and groups claiming a host of new international LGBT rights have been able to make even international law somewhat interesting. It is no secret that International law is not terribly exciting – reading the minutes of a meeting of the UN International Law Commission or an international human rights body is [...]
Former Prostituted Woman to Speak on UN Panel
Within the CEDAW Committee’s hall of shame, telling China to decriminalize prostitution holds a prize spot. In a promising turn of events, UN Women, the two-year old agency tasked with handling all-things-women at the UN, will highlight a woman who escaped from prostitution. The “Survivors Forum” is a panel discussion hosted by UN Women this [...]
Cooler heads prevailed on Disabilities Treaty
The Hill, a newspaper for people who work on U.S. federal legislation, ran Dr. Susan Yoshihara’s op ed today on the defeat of the vote on the UN Disability treaty. Dr. Yoshihara, who participated in the negotiations of the UN treaty, anticipated the political attacks that may come against the dissenting senators. Her op ed [...]
Disability Treaty Goes to Senate Floor
Senator Reid made a motion yesterday to move the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to executive session. The motion passed allowing debate to follow. Foreign Relations committee chairman Sen. John Kerry followed with an opening statement in which he tried to assure senators that the convention would not grant any new [...]
Human Rights Official Riles Up UN Delegates, Fire Alarm Goes Off
Yesterday was UN Day. A day to celebrate the accomplishments of the world’s only universal international organization, and the progress of the world’s nations towards a brighter more peaceful future. But UN delegates at the third committee meeting of the 67th plenary session of the General Assembly were more concerned with highlighting overreaching by the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ms. [...]
No Need to Ratify New UN Treaty
Yesterday Wendy Wright and I spent our lunch hour at the new state of the art US Mission to the UN at 45th St and 1st Ave. We attended a side event hosted by the US delegation to the UN on Disability Rights. The side event was held because of the ongoing Conference of States Parties [...]
The Hidden Cost of a UN Interpretation of New UN Treaty
Will ratifying the newest UN human rights treaty place additional financial burdens on the U.S., international institutions and others? Advocates are heavily lobbying the U.S. to ratify the newest UN human rights treaty, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability. Some promise U.S. decision-makers that ratification will not change anything domestically, but will [...]
Human Rights Roulette: What it Means to Ratify a New UN Treaty
The United Nations Convention on the Protection of Persons with Disabilities is certainly a nobly inspired document, but it creates more problems than it solves. The Senate thankfully has not been able to vote on the ratification of the new treaty, this week, in time for the summer recess. But sooner, rather than later, and possibly as soon [...]
Guyana Delegation Agrees: Maternal Mortality Not Linked to Unsafe Abortions
As the Chilean study found, the reduction in the maternal mortality rate is NOT related to the legal status of abortion. The CEDAW Committee once again tried to show that there is a link between the number of unsafe abortions and the high rate of maternal mortality. One of the Committee experts asked the Guyana [...]
CEDAW Expert Supervillains Keep Hurting Women
Staff from every major, and not so major, UN entity, human rights agency, program and organization showed up yesterday morning in Conference Room 3 of the temporary North Lawn Building at UN Headquarters in New York at a commemorative event for the 30th anniversary of the CEDAW Committee. Later during the evening, the same crowd [...]
Scandal and the human rights system
Julian Ku over at Opinio Juris posted today on the intertwined relationship between UN human rights bodies and activist US law professors. He picks up on Walter Olson’s piece in the Daily Caller. The cases focus on the abuse of monitoring bodies and special rapporteur positions to promote special rights in the case of indigenous peoples. This is the [...]
Non-Aligned Movement Meeting in Egpyt this Week to discuss UN Reform
The Ministerial Coordinating Bureau of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is meeting in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt this week in preparation for the 16th annual NAM Summit Conference to be held in Tehran in November later this year. The coordinating bureau has announced that it will discuss the following: A review international law; promotion [...]
Sovereignty in Action: Beating Back Beaurocratic Inertia at the UN
Sovereignty is a word that isn’t used within the UN superstructure, its bureaucracies, thousands of documents, reports and resolutions and frankly even UN member states. The UN system always tries to work towards achieving consensus, and to merely mention that each and every individual state has a the power and sovereign prerogative to undo consensus [...]
The End of the MDGs?
This morning the Secretary General, and Rebeca Grynspan, Associate Administrator of UNDP, and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Special Adviser on the MDGs, held a press conference to report on the progress towards achieving the MDG’s. The SG described Sachs and Grynspan as his “top development experts and senior advisers.” They cited a report issued this week [...]
Promoting “traditional values of humankind” at the UN
In Geneva, the Advisory Committee of the Human Rights Council is currently discussing its “Preliminary Study on promoting human rights and fundamental freedoms through a better understanding of traditional values of humankind”. This study is part of the effort of the Human Rights Council to implement its resolutions 12/21 and 16/3 adopted on 2 October [...]
From Russia with Love: 126 non-governmental Organisations in Russia and Ukraine condemn UN attempts to manufacure false “human rights”
On 24 November 2011, representatives from 126 non-governmental organisations in Russia and Ukraine have adopted an impressive statement called the Saint-Petersburg-Resolution, calling the UN and its various organisations to order. The Resolution, which in unconpromising language condemns the “anti-family tendencies prevailing in the UN and various of its committees”, is built on the model of [...]
Center for Reproductive Rights gives briefings to UN bodies?
This is old news. It happened in May 2010 but it did not get any attention at the time. Apparently, the Committee for Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, which monitors the implementation of the UN treaty by the same name, got briefed by the Center for Reproductive Rights on the issue of maternal mortality. The [...]
Regulating “Hate Speech” Part II –the Yogyakarta Agenda Advances at the Expense of Fundamental Freedoms at UN Conference in Chile
In a previous posting I called attention to red flags over free speech raised at the first Expert Workshop on the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred, sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Indeed, the entire project, ostensibly intended to aid the Human Rights Committee as it drafts a “General Comment” outlining [...]
PIERO TOZZI speaks at Human Life International’s Second International Congress for Truth and Life in Brazil
Here is an interview from the Catholic News Agency of C-FAM’s senior fellow Piero Tozzi. He was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, speaking at a Human Life international Conference. He told those in attendance that “there is no such thing in international law as a ‘right to abortion.’ This is a concept that is completely fabricated [...]