While hundreds of thousands are dying due to the callous indifference of the military junta in Burma and millions are fleeing oppression and hunger in Robert Mugabe’s brutal Zimbabwe, the U.N.’s farcical Human Rights Council (HRC) is focusing its attention elsewhere — the United States, the freest nation on the face of the earth. This week sees the arrival on U.S. soil of Doudou Diene, the U.N. special rapporteur charged with investigating “racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance” in America. Diene, a French-educated lawyer from Senegal, will spend three weeks touring the country, from Washington and New York to Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
He will compile a lengthy report to be published next year, but which will no doubt have more leaks than a French aircraft carrier in the first Gulf War. It is hard not to conclude that the U.N. is up to mischief in commissioning a major investigation during a presidential-election year. The United Nations has a habit of interfering in U.S. elections, as it showed in 2004, when the New York Times published an “October surprise” a week ahead of the election revealing that 380 tons of powerful explosives had gone missing from the al-Qaqaa former military complex in Baghdad. The article, which sparked a political storm, was based on information which was likely leaked by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headed by Mohammed El Baradei, and which prompted Senator John Kerry to accuse President Bush of “incredible incompetence” in his handling of security in Iraq.
Doudou Diene has a track record of focusing his attention on freedom-loving democratic societies, with damning reports on alleged institutionalized racism in countries such as Japan, Canada, Denmark, and Switzerland. His reports are highly controversial and are usually rejected out of hand by the Western governments he is targeting. Like most other U.N. “Special Rapporteurs” Diene is unaccountable as well as unqualified for the position he holds. The United Nations doesn’t even bother to post his biography online, though his career details can be found on the website of the Organization of American States. His entire career has been spent as a U.N. bureaucrat, with absolutely no real world experience. Even by the dismally low standards of the United Nations, Diene is a spectacular non-entity.
With the rare exception of Russia, Diene has chosen to ignore real human-rights violations in most dictatorial states, especially in Africa, Asia, or the Middle East. He has barely said a word about Chinese oppression in Tibet for example, and has been largely silent about the genocide in Darfur. Nor has he ever condemned the rampant anti-Semitism which runs deep through the Human Rights Council.
