[quote]
North Korea to Chair UN Disarmament Conference [/quote]
[quote]Despite numerous breaches of arms embargoes and continued threats to expand its nuclear weapons program, North Korea has assumed the presidency of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament. In a speech to the 65-nation arms control forum in Geneva, the newly-appointed president, North Korean Ambassador So Se Pyong, said he was “very much committed to the Conference.”
Appointing a North Korean to chair the UN’s only multilateral disarmament forum is like “asking the fox to guard the chickens,” says Hillel Neuer, of the UN watchdog organization UN Watch. Neuer is calling on the U.S. and European governments to protest the appointment, which he says, “damages the UN’s credibility.”
sorry about the Fox link, many other outlets were providing country specific reaction and I was forced to go with Fox, but look at it this way, we got one clown Manhattan HQ’d operation analyzing another Manhattan HQ’d operation…that’s fun!
TC: How can it exist and not be tyrannical though? If it’s not tyrannical, and democratic instead, then the world’s great human rights abusers will get an equal say with those with better records, which makes the whole thing a joke.
If for nothing the UN atleast gets all parties on a table to discuss things. Try getting delegates of a 140 countries together to talk on anything and you’ll know what I mean. Egos, agenda the whole thing. By becoming a member of the UN, states can go to an AIDS conference, come back home disappointed but that would not stop them from going to a Climate Change one. Without a uniting body, once miffed, a state will just not be ready to comply or listen. Which basically means no one will be ready for any kind of talks at all.
The UN does need to sharpen its teeth, get some work done and tell the US to not run the UN agenda but for now at least it’s getting everybody in a room.
[quote=“GuyInTaiwan”]TC: How can it exist and not be tyrannical though? If it’s not tyrannical, and democratic instead, then the world’s great human rights abusers will get an equal say with those with better records, which makes the whole thing a joke.[/quote]GIT -
I must be honest and say I do not understand just what you are asking.
You appear to be, sad to say, describing what the UN has devolved into.
TC: Was it ever going to be any other way though? The fatal flaw in thinking was that eventually everyone would become like the minority of Western nations. They don’t want to and probably never will. If you give someone a democratic right, why would they exercise that in any way other than to represent themselves and what they stand for (and if there are more of them, they will get the majority and be able to dictate things to the minority)? Surely that’s not an unforseen or unintended consequence, but rather, quite obvious and predictable.
Peacekeeping on the India-Pakistan border, Cyprus, and Southern Lebanon, driving Saddam out of Kuwait, and the many things that UNICEF has done.
for example.
Peacekeeping on the India-Pakistan border, Cyprus, and Southern Lebanon, driving Saddam out of Kuwait, and the many things that UNICEF has done.
for example.[/quote]
creating an AIDS epidemic in Cambodia, denying the 23 million democratic Chinese in Taiwan a voice, doing nothing to stop genocide in Africa, being toothless in enforcing arms inspections in Iraq, spending billions on statistical analysis that holds water like a sieve, etc…etc…etc…
sure the UN isn’t a COMPLETE shitshow, but if it were held to any standard, it would fail miserably, and that is a sad, costly pathetic joke.
I don’t think you want the UN. What you want is Batman and his Super Friends.
More than 30 million refugees fleeing war, famine or persecution have received aid from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees since 1951.
UN agencies have worked to make safe drinking wateravailable to 1.3 billion people in rural areas during the last decade.
A 13-year effort by the World Health Organization resulted in the complete eradication of smallpox from the planet in 1980. The eradication has saved an estimated $1 billion a year in vaccination and monitoring.
UNEP led a major effort to clean up the Mediterranean Sea. It encouraged adversaries such as Syria and Israel, Turkey and Greece to work together to clean up beaches. As a result, more than 50 per cent of the previously polluted beaches are now usable.
The UN Population Fund, through its family planningprogrammes, has enabled people to make informed choices, and consequently given families, and especially women, greater control over their lives. As a result, women in devloping countries are having fewer children - from six births per woman in the 1960s to 3.5 today. gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol1_2/Human.htm
But isn’t this just an example of what we see all the time in US law – the oversight being done by the violators? I mean, when lobbyists for big industry write laws, that’s great, but when north korea oversees the disarmament panel…
I mean, having the disarmament panel being overseen by a nation committed to disarmament would be like having regulatory agencies run by people who were committed to what they were doing.
