Repression, torture, rape, brainwashing, enslavement, murder, genocide: good things or bad things?
This kind of difficult moral question is not going to be resolved in the United Nations, which can’t quite see its way to revoking the memberships of the very worst states. (In all its history, the UN has kicked out only one country so far: Taiwan. To appease China.)
However, as Tibetan Review reports, everybody in the UN had a chance recently to get together and in at least 45 seconds say whether they were for or against China’s record on human rights (“China battered by rights criticism…,” January 25, 2024):
China met stinging criticism from Western countries during a review of its rights record at the United Nations on Jan 23, while other nations lumped praise on Beijing, including Russia and Iran, reported the AFP Jan 24. However, according to China’s official Xinhua news agency, those who spoke at the fourth meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group had nothing but praise for Beijing’s record….
As a result of China’s hectic lobbying effort, a total of 163 countries signed up to talk during the half-day session on China, leaving each country with just 45 seconds to speak. The Global South states used the occasion to praise China’s fight to alleviate poverty and its outreach to developing nations, said the scmp.com Jan 24.
Many of them congratulated China on securing and beginning its sixth term as a member of the UN Human Rights Council, and expected it to play a leading role in global human rights governance and to uphold international justice, said China’s official Xinhua news agency Jan 24.
What about Ukraine? This: “We commend China’s commitment to the promotion of humanity’s common values, which embrace universal and inalienable human rights,” said the Ukraine’s UN rep. Forty-five seconds too many for this guy.
It had cost the United States more than a hundred billion dollars to secure this formal statement of respect for universal and inalienable human rights…as preserved and protected by China.
“In China,” says Wang Wenbin, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, “the people are the masters, human rights are enjoyed equally by all, and the fundamental interests of the people can be realized, protected and advanced.”
All people, including despots and their enablers, have their own perspectives and interpretations of things, and this applies as well to the meanings of words like “common,” “values,” “inalienable,” “rights,” “masters,” “enjoyed,” “equally,” “realized,” “protected,” and “advanced.”
Is China committing itself to and promoting the “common value” of the “inalienable human rights” of its people when, for example, one of many possible examples, it forcibly transfers hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs guilty of being Uyghurs from their homes to reeducation camps, there to undergo all manner of abuse and, if especially unlucky, death? Forty-five seconds. Go.
