Human Rights: The solution - follow international law

Twenty years after the creation of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the High Commissioner Navi Pillay has issued a mixed report, claiming successes over the last two decades but also pointing out that a UN Office is far from being sufficient to address the issue. Suppose countries just obeyed the law?

Basic human rights are enshrined in the Constitutions of most sovereign states and all international covenants governing the issues of inviolability of the person and basic rights to goods and services such as education. An example is India, much in the spotlight this year because of the women's rights issue, however a country whose laws protect women from gender violence and guarantee equality.

So it is not a question of having laws and as Navi Pillay states, it is not sufficient to have a UN Office. What is necessary is to implement the measures already existing in Constitutions and Covenants, Agreements and Treaties. To what extent the letter of the law is followed, however, is a question of money in a world in which the goalposts are so often moved, principally by players who do not practice what they preach.

Let us take the case of Libya as a shining example of flagrant and blatant breach of international law by France, the United Kingdom and the United States (the FUKUS Axis), among other NATO poodle states and the Middle East Cooperation Council, boot-licking lackeys such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain. Not only were the Geneva Conventions breached, so were the UN Resolutions covering the case (1970 and 1973 -2011) quite apart from common criminal law - acts of murder, rape, grievous and actual bodily harm, arson, destruction of property, criminal negligence occasioning murder, support of terrorists and instigation of terrorist activities, torture, mutilation, desecration of graves, to name but a few abuses.

Surely, if western powers were supporting those who committed such outrages, then these powers but be held responsible and their political and military agents must be brought to justice to stand trial for their alleged war crimes?

But no, the human rights of some are more guaranteed than the human rights of others. In the United Kingdom, for instance, some rioters were jailed for stealing a bottle of mineral water from a shop with a smashed window, while Members of Parliament had a tap on the wrist for stealing plasma TV screens using taxpayers' money, in return for comments such as "If I have to pay anything back, then I shall".

The UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office was supporting members of LIFG, the Libyan terrorist group proscribed as a terrorist organization on its own list - yet William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, sits in his Whitehall Office as if nothing had happened.

The false flag event in Syria, in which chemical agents were deployed by terrorist elements, allegedly with the connivance or even support of their western masters, with the aim of incriminating the Government, is another example of outright flouting of any standards of decency, moral values, quite apart from the law.

So with major international players such as the FUKUS Axis and their bed-boys acting like rogue states after Iraq, after Libya and after Syria, where the carnage continues because they continue to support terrorists, how is any discussion of human rights issues relevant, in a world where common and basic human values are disrespected by those pandering to the whims and caprices of the lobbies which pull their strings?

Nothing has changed since Churches were basing their precepts upon mottoes such as  Thou shalt not kill, then marching off to war, torching "heretics" or drowning "witches". Thank you Messrs. Cameron, Hague, Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Juppé, Sarkozy and Fabius for your wonderful contribution to the beginning of the Third Millennium. May the annals of History throw the book at you.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Pravda.Ru