Human Rights Watch denounces Cuba, Russia, and China as unworthy of serving on UN Human Rights Council

From our Bureau of Praiseworthy Quixotic Gestures

As the U.N. General Assembly prepares to vote next Tuesday on whether Cuba, Russia, and China should get another three-year appointment to the U.N. Human Rights Council, the international watchdog organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged all member nations to ensure that these three repressive regimes lose this election.

Excellent move. Many international news outlets are covering this story. But will this denunciation have any effect on the vote at the U.N. or on the behavior of those three hellholes?

Not likely. Of course, you already know that, don’t you? Saddle up, Don Quixote, you’ve got giants to topple . . .

Abridged from Human Rights Watch

United Nations member countries should deny Russia and China seats on the UN Human Rights Council in voting at the UN General Assembly on October 10, 2023, Human Rights Watch said today. Authorities in both countries have been responsible for numerous crimes against humanity as well as other grave human rights violations, making them fall far short of the membership standards for the UN’s top human rights body.

Cuba and Burundi are also running for three-year terms despite not meeting the membership criteria. They have committed systematic human rights violations, including harassment, arbitrary detention and torture of dissidents. Delegations in the 193-nation General Assembly should take all four countries’ abysmal human rights records into consideration when casting their votes in the secret-ballot election for 15 council seats for 2024-2026.

“Every day Russia and China remind us by committing abuses on a massive scale that they should not be members of the UN Human Rights Council,” said Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch. “No country on the Human Rights Council has an unblemished rights record, but every UN member nation should recognize that the council has membership standards for which Russia and China show despicable disregard.” . . .

. . .With regard to Cuba, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported in 2022 that Cuban state agents engage in “systematic repression” of peaceful protesters and dissidents, and that the government has committed “massive, serious and systematic violations of human rights.” UN human rights experts have similarly reported on patterns of arbitrary detention, ill-treatment, and torture in Cuba. Human rights organizations have documented hundreds of cases of political prisoners – protesters, critics, journalists, independent artists, and opposition leaders — detained for exercising their basic human rights.

Read the whole denunciation HERE