Asean Inaugurates Human Rights Commission – NYTimes.com

Don’t cut the cake—the new HRC for ASEAN didn’t get a great start this week, adding to skepticism that the secretive, poorly attended and conflict-ridden discussion could produce a functioning new body:

…human rights activists called the body toothless and walked out of a meeting here Friday when “civil society” representatives from five countries were rejected by their governments.

“The commission has not been designed to be effective and impartial,” said Debbie Stothard, a human rights activist from Malaysia.

via Asean Inaugurates Human Rights Commission – NYTimes.com.

Rightist on BBC Panel Draws Protests and Viewers – NYTimes.com

How far is too far for freedom of speech?  The uproar across the pond is more than a huff—but raises interesting questions about the limits of political discourse and whether the Beeb did well by promoting a wide range of views:

The occasion was the appearance on “Question Time,” the BBC’s flagship politics program, of Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, whose goal to “take back Britain” includes incentives that encourage the mass repatriation of Britain’s nonwhite immigrants, coupled with a deep hostility to Islam, which Mr. Griffin has described as “a wicked and vicious faith.” He has also spoken of his “repugnance” for lesbians and gays, and advocated the end of civil contracts for same-sex relationships.

His record includes having denied the Holocaust, suggesting that some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were built after World War II for the purposes of Jewish propaganda, and conceding, under questioning by a biographer, that Hitler may have made some mistakes. “Yes,” he said, according to the biographer, Dominic Carman, “Adolf went a bit too far.”

via Rightist on BBC Panel Draws Protests and Viewers – NYTimes.com.

Over in the Colonies, a great visualization of the FDR’s Four Freedoms–which were a key concept in the founding of international organizations.

In “Freedom of Speech,” however, Rockwell found a subject that is active and public, a subject he could grasp and shape into his greatest painting forging traditional American illustration into a powerful and enduring work of art.

Op-Ed Contributor – Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast – NYTimes.com

Concern from the founder of Human Rights Watch that his former non-governmental organization–one that wields more power with international organizations that most small states–has gone astray:

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies….

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields.

via Op-Ed Contributor – Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast – NYTimes.com.

Furor Sends Palestinians Into Shift on U.N. Report – NYTimes.com

The Palestinian “street” pushes back on the Goldstone report, and Palestinian UN delegates reverse course.  Altogether, not a step toward the peace talks that George Mitchell is hoping to restart next Wednesday:

But after pushing for the United Nations Human Rights Council to endorse the report and forward it to the Security Council, the Palestinians relented to American pressure last week and agreed to drop the issue for six months. Both the United States and Israel had warned that pursuing the accusations would abort attempts to revive the peace process.

Now the Palestinians are grappling with a domestic and regional uproar, with angry street protests at home and condemnation pouring in from Doha to Damascus.

via Furor Sends Palestinians Into Shift on U.N. Report – NYTimes.com.

Ahmadinejad @ the UN

How effective will Ahmadinejad be at the UN—how will the story go?

Mindful of the horrific human rights abuses that have taken place in Iran in the aftermath of the stolen elections, and the continuing protests and resistance by ordinary Iranians, one would think that Ahmadinejad’s lack of internal legitimacy would be the natural topic of conversation. But Ahmadinejad is not a man of limited resources.

He knows how to deflect the attention of the media and he is a master of changing the subject. And he knows all too well how to push the buttons of Western audiences.

So it is not a surprise that after having been relatively quiet about the Holocaust for almost two years, Ahmadinejad suddenly decided to question it once again just a few days before landing in New York. At the Friday prayer sermons on September 18, Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a “lie.”

His calculation seems to be as follows: Just as before, Western journalists will focus on the controversy around his Holocaust denial, while neglecting about the abuses and violations that are taking place in Iran on a continuous basis. The controversial Holocaust comments will overshadow everything else and will be the focus of not only Western media, but also the protests in New York as well as the statements and comments by European officials. At a minimum, it may help Ahmadinejad portray the situation as such to his audience in Iran.

via Trita Parsi: Will the Focus at the UN Be on Ahmadinejad’s Human Rights Abuses?.

Iranian Protesters in NY outside the UN weren’t happy [video]

And finally, Thomas Friedman provides a dialogue on how the US should handle this very tricky moment with Iran:

“The Obama administration must reconcile how to deal with a disgraced regime, which presents urgent national security challenges, while at the same time not betray a democratic movement whose success could have enormously positive implications for the U.S.,” said Sadjadpour.

Is Water a Human Right?

Good question.  This review by Kendra Okonski in The New Atlantis tackles the issue, as well as two recent documentaries.  To sum up, take care how you approaches this (or any critical zero-sum) issue:

Ultimately, it is not these activists’ methods or love of street theater that is the problem. Nor is it even their lack of pragmatism or their factual omissions. The chief problem is that these activists’ ideas can genuinely harm the very people they mean to help. They find disenfranchised local people—people who truly suffer from government-induced water scarcity, for example—and exploit them for ideological ends. Well meaning though they may be, these water activists misunderstand or misstate the institutional deficiencies that contribute not just to water scarcity, but poverty in general.

Attacking corporations and lamenting globalization will not alleviate the water crisis. Nor will pretending that water is a human right. We require another paradigm of right—the right to property, and the institutions and practices that enforce that right—to put self-interested individual creativity in the service of managing, delivering, and preserving our world’s precious water.

via The New Atlantis » Is Water a Human Right?.

ATCA Primer | Now Going After Deep Pockets for Human Rights Violations

In case you haven’t heard of the Alien Torts Claim Act, its the latest thing in human rights civil litigation work, and thanks to a recent case against Royal Dutch Shell the gloves are still off.  Depending on who you are–big MNC hoping to do business around the world or do-gooding human rights NGO–the idea that you can hold companies accountable, even as countries possess sovereign immunity, is widely debated.  Ashby Jones on a WSJ blog notes:

Some legal experts claim that opportunistic plaintiffs’ lawyers have seized on the law to enrich themselves. Human-rights lawyers, on the other hand, counter that victims of abuses often can’t obtain justice in foreign courts, making such suits their only recourse.

Its worth perusing Nathan Koppel’s WSJ article of 8.27.09 for a quick primer on this tool/cost for international activists/businesspersons, as well as Business Human Rights site to see more detail on other cases. One thing is clear, however, in considering liability–in this new era of bustling cases:

The Second Circuit ruling sparked a surge in alien tort suits, but it wasn’t until the 1990s, lawyers say, that plaintiffs started targeting corporations, often under the theory that they aided foreign officials or third parties who committed abuses. In assessing liability, a key question can be whether companies assisted a foreign government that was known to violate human rights, says Joe Cyr, a New York lawyer who defends companies against alien tort claims. But the law is unclear, he adds, about what constitutes knowledge. “Is it enough to just read a newspaper or a blog that a particular sovereign is engaged in human-rights violations?” Mr. Cyr says. “Multinationals incur risks anytime they do business with anyone who has been accused of human-rights violations.”  Most federal districts now allow suits against corporations for the same types of human-rights violations that can be brought against individuals — torture, extrajudicial killings, slavery-like practices, war crimes, says Paul Hoffman, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in filing alien tort suits.

Big Dog Diplomacy | Bill Abroad

I usually agree with the writer David Denby that too much snark is a bad societal thing–and thus agree with him that Maureen Dowd generally serves no larger social purpose. Think of her as the TMZ for intelligent NYT readers, a kind of grammarporn. But I must give credit where it is due–her analysis, yes, once you punch through all those clever wordages–is the best one then on Bill Clinton’s successful meet n’ greet.

Maybe it was some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy. Just as Hillary muscled her way back into the spotlight, moving past her broken elbow and grabbing the focus from her bevy of peacock envoys, she was blown off the radar screen again by an even more powerful envoy: the one she lives with.

It was a moment unique in the annals of diplomacy. Bill was being hailed as a dazzling statesman who might have changed the stormy weather between the U.S. and North Korea, just as Hillary was beginning an 11-day trip to Africa designed to highlight the subjects she most cares about: do-gooder development and women’s issues.

Another fine take on the experience (best headline ever: “Bill and Kim’s Excellently-Posed Adventure“) comes from the renowned designer Ken Carbone:

The real star in this picture is the tremendous painting in the background. It dominates this cast of characters. Is it a raging symbol of strength? Is it a tsunami of power? If it’s to send a message that North Korea is a force to be reckoned with, they should probably lose the tacky casino carpeting in the foreground. I love this painting. It lends energy to a pose that could serve as a model for a wax recreation in a Pyongyang Madame Tussaud’s.

UPDATE | Another Big Dog of foreign policy, Dr. Henry Kissinger himself, weighs in on the diplomatic winners/losers in WaPo.  His take:

The root cause of our decade-old controversy with Pyongyang is that there is no middle ground between North Korea being a nuclear-weapons state and a state without nuclear weapons. At the end of a negotiation, North Korea will either destroy its nuclear arsenal or it will become a de facto nuclear state. So far, Pyongyang has used the negotiating forums available to it in a skillful campaign of procrastination, alternating leaps in technological progress with negotiating phases to consolidate it.

The “Bug Pit” of Bukhara and Other Reflections on Torture

A British officer named Charles Stoddart was sent on to Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan, to assure the emir he had nothing to fear from Britain, and to try and make an alliance against the Russians. Known for his depravity and cruelty, the emir had Stoddart thrown into a 20-foot pit filled with insects and other vermin.

via Bukhara on the Potomac | GlobalPost.

Holocaust: The Ignored Reality – The New York Review of Books

Thanks to Simon Schama for this important rethinking of the Holocaust in NYR of Books:

Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’s Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.

A much-reoccuring argument for multilateral orgs and the role diplomacy plays in stemming conflict derives at least some of its moral authority from the Holocaust and other holocausts/genocides.  It is important to keep remembering, especially as Americans reflect on the expansive freedoms we enjoy in this incredible country.