Thursday, December 10, 2009

More "Human Rights" Dementia

The world isn't measuring up, human rights-wise, so the U.K. Green Party, reports the Guardian, has come up with a "brilliant" way to tackle it:
...These deficiencies need to be addressed if the international community is to secure human rights progress. We need benchmarks against which all countries can be measured, without fear or favour. There is no easy way to ensure that the principles of the UDHR are upheld by UN member states but the power of publicity and moral leverage should not be underestimated. Even tyrannies are conscious of their image and seek to avoid opprobrium.
This is why the Green party of England and Wales is advocating a UN Global Human Rights Index, as a means of measuring and ranking human rights abuses, country by country. The aim is to create a human rights league table to pressure governments to clean up their record. "Our proposal makes the case for the UN to publish an annual Global Human Rights Index, detailing the human rights performance of each and every government on the planet, displayed in a league table form," said Dr Richard Lawson, Green party member and founder of the campaign for the Global Human Rights Index. Speaking at the launch of the index idea last year, he said: "This will enable the relative human rights standing and trends of each country to be seen at a glance. It would add pressure on the worst ranked countries to improve their human rights record."...
I know--let's get the UN to set up a "human rights" body that can use its "moral" leverage and express opprobrium for "human rights" violators.

Yeah, that'll work.

We need a "human rights" index about as much as we need a UNHRC.

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