Human rights abuser Cuba fiercely campaigns for seat on UN Human Rights Council

Decades of imprisoning, torturing, and murdering dissidents won’t stop the Cuban regime from campaigning for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council. Despite its long and ongoing history of crimes against humanity, the communist Castro dictatorship shamefully still enjoys support from “free” nations at the UN.

An Op-Ed by Andres Oppenheimer via Yahoo News:

Believe it or not, Cuba is campaigning for a seat at the U.N. Human Rights Council

Here’s one of the most outrageous things going on in the world of diplomacy: Cuba — which after its 2021 mass arrests of peaceful protesters has one of the highest populations of political prisoners in the world — is running for re-election as a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

What’s just as crazy, it might get enough votes to secure its seat when the U.N. General Assembly meets in mid-October to elect new members to the 47-seat Geneva-based Council.

Four Latin American countries — Brazil, Cuba, Peru and the Dominican Republic — are running for the Council’s three Latin American seats whose terms expire at the end of this year.

“Sadly, based on the fact that Cuba has always been elected, you have to assume that they have good chances of winning again,” Hillel Neuer, head of the U.N. Watch monitoring group, told me.”But if the free world fights for it, Cuba can be defeated.”

It won’t be easy to prevent Cuba from winning the vote. Dictatorships go out of their way to win seats at the U.N. Human Rights Council in order to protect themselves against criticism for their human-rights abuses, and Cuba is doing just that.

Five of the 17 countries running for Council seats are dictatorships, including China, Russia and Cuba. And he 70% of the Council’s current members either are dictatorships or have poor human-rights records, U.N. Watch says.

This year, Cuba is campaigning especially hard to keep its seat at the Council. Last week, the regime opened a photo exhibit at the lobby of the U.N. headquarters in New York to try to portray itself as a rightful member of the Council, Cuba’s independent 14yMedio.com online magazine reported.

The exhibit included pictures of Cuba’s medical missions abroad, which human-rights groups have portrayed as modern-day slave trafficking.

Under Cuba’s government-to-government deals with Mexico and other countries, often brokered by the Pan-American Health Organization, the Cuban regime gets the physicians’ full wages, while it later pays the doctors only about 20% of their salaries.

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