We note that on the side of events that happened during the 53rd Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) that happened on 19 June to 14 July 2023, a lady from an Arab country (that I choose not to mention) said furiously that no one should be left behind as far as human rights preservation across the globe is concerned. However, in the increasingly politicized the UNHRC, such voice sounds increasingly weak and helpless.
The UNHRC, a platform designed to improve global human rights conditions through dialogue and cooperation, is now clouded by rivalry and confrontation, thanks to some Western countries continuing to politicize human right issues, and taking the UNHRC as an occasion to smear and humiliate target countries.
The end of the Cold War led the West to believe that their way of human rights protection and democracy shaped the “end of history.” Human rights issues became a useful tool, sometimes a convenient excuse, for some Western countries to interfere in other nations’ internal affairs this has happened in Uganda after the signing of the Anti-Homosexuality bill 2023 and affairs of Ethiopia. In the 1990’s, NATO, under the leadership of the US, claimed that “human rights are above sovereignty,” and launched air strikes on Yugoslavia and, which brutally killed thousands of innocent people. This is far from protecting human rights. In the early 2010s, the US and some of its allies tried to bring Western-style democracy to some Arab countries i.e Libya, which only resulted in long-lasting unrest and humanitarian disasters. This is infringement of human rights.
The “Arab Spring” never brought its promised dissolve to these Middle East countries, but rather a freezing winter. This scenario repeated itself time and again whenever the West tried to bring down others in the name of human rights protection. With more and more people around the world exhausted by the incantations of the Western “tale” of human rights protection, those tricksters will have to face their humiliation.
This is exactly why the so-called human rights issues in African countries like Ethiopia have been rejected in the UNHRC when a US-initiated draft decision was voted down. The international community knows that the so-called human rights situations in African countries is nothing but a Big Joke card played against, and lies are still lies, even when they are retold thousands of times.
In a sense, quite a few of the country-specific resolutions of the UNHRC targeting developing countries and initiated by the West should be voted down, since they are tailored with Western double standards and only fit in the agenda of the West against African cultures. Although facts show that the West is never qualified enough to do so, as in each UNHRC session you can hear human rights organizations criticizing gun violence and racial discrimination in the US and so on, yet in room XX of the Palais des Nations, where the session is held, the agenda is often about “naming and shaming” African developing countries.
This kind of “superiority” of the West was not naturally born with but rather cultivated, they highlighted the right to liberty while ignored the right to life and security in the UNHRC so that they seemed to be “authorized” to blame developing countries’ political system as “dictatorship” or “autocracy” and found a way to boast the Western value as superior. They prefer to play down the right to life and security because, firstly, they are fully aware of their own poor record of protecting their citizens from threats like drugs and gun violence that deprive people’s life and security. They are afraid of being exposed. And secondly, they know that the biggest challenge to developing countries in safeguarding people’s rights to life and security stems from wars waged by the West, unilateral sanctions imposed by the West and coercive behaviours made by the West. They are afraid of being accused of what they do.
All the aforementioned ill-practices shall soon come to an end. The UNHRC should serve as a platform for constructive exchanges and cooperation among all nations instead of a battlefield for political confrontation. The improvement of universal human rights conditions does not come from accusations, even less slanders, but from an introspection into oneself, especially into those who have been acting with hypocrisy for so long.
Image Credit: Mathias Reding on Unsplash
