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To Restore U.N. Commission's Credibility
Posted on Mon, Jun. 02, 2003 in
The Miami Herald.
The rogue nations are at it again. Cuba's regime, among the world's most
proficient human-rights abusers, is leading the charge to yank the consultive
status of Reporters Without Frontiers at the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Why is this no surprise? We've seen it before. Cuba and other human-rights
violators act in concert to silence their critics. The United Nations mustn't
let them get away with it again. Rather, the United Nations needs to purge the
rogues' undue influence if it wants to restore credibility to its Human Rights
Commission.
Of course, Cuba's repressive regime wants to retaliate against Reporters
Without Frontiers. The watchdog group known by its French acronym, RSF,
aggressively has condemned the regime's crackdown on independent journalists
locked up for doing nothing more than expressing their views.
In Paris, RSF protesters turned a Cuba tourism office into a mock prison in
April by taping photos of jailed Cuban journalists in the storefront window.
Among those featured was Ricardo González, sentenced to 20 years for
being the RSF Havana correspondent and other allegedly seditious acts. When RSF
later staged a protest outside Cuba's embassy in Paris, Cuban ''diplomats'' beat
up a dozen demonstrators.
In another attack, the regime complained that RSF had ''disrupted'' the U.N.
Human Rights Commission's opening session this year. What RSF did was drop
leaflets protesting the choice of Libya as commission chair. The commission
should be ashamed to have Libya, a serial human-rights abuser, at its helm.
Without giving RSF a chance to respond, the U.N. Committee on
Non-Governmental Organizations voted to suspend RSF's status for a year. No
wonder. The countries that voted against RSF are a rogues' gallery: China, Cuba,
Iran, Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Russia, Sudan, Turkey and Zimbabwe. The inmates,
indeed, have taken charge of the asylum.
The final vote on RSF's suspension will come in yet another United Nations
committee meeting in July. The United States has said that it will try to
counter the campaign against RSF. Good.
The Human Rights Commission needs to be saved from itself. | 
