Fancy name for policy police

Whether or not this is intended to be a smokescreen, it’s too flimsy.

“UN Special Rapporteur” is a title given to individuals working on behalf of the United Nations who bear a specific mandate from the former UN Commission on Human Rights to investigate, monitor, and recommend solutions to human-rights problems. Special Rapporteurs are called to be “of high moral character” and act with “integrity, independence and impartiality.” They have 3-year mandates which are renewable for three years.

The first important issue here is what the UN as a body considers “human rights problems”. The second is what these ‘special reporters’ do to police the world’s handling of those problems.

At the recently concluded Human Rights Council (HRC) meetings in Geneva, several UN Special Rapporteurs presented annual reports that undercut religion, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-Fam) reports.

Religious faith is a problem for UN officials engaged in promoting radical feminism and an expansive view of homosexual rights, while discrediting national sovereignty, notes Samantha Singson in C-Fam’s Friday Fax.

Special Rapporteur Yakin Erturk, who covers violence against women, said that in the coming year she would be placing special emphasis on sexual orientation. In this year’s report Erturk calls for state parties to the convention on elimination of violence against women to remove any reservations based on religion. Ertuk said any such reservations can only be viewed as “incompatible” with the convention and contrary to the rights of women.

Erturk also told the Human Rights Council that abstinence-based programs for combating HIV/AIDS “reinforce ideologies of men’s control over women’s sexuality (however they may be culturally framed) and thereby contribute to the perpetuation of the root cause of many forms of violence against women.”

These special reporters are using this opportunity to reinforce their own ideology.

UN Special Rapporteur on Health Paul Hunt asked the HRC to call for the “right to health” a highly controversial and vague term into which is packed much of radical sexual policy…

Hunt announced at a March meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women that the majority of his reports “dealt with the sexual and reproductive health of girls.” He said one of the goals of his work as Rapporteur was to teach children about sex without talking about reproduction, asking, “If adults bury sexuality in the term ‘reproduction’, how will children understand? So I talk about sexual health rights.”

What to say…

Conservatives at the HRC meetings told the Friday Fax that there was a move among delegations to terminate the mandates of Rapporteurs who overstep or abuse their mandates, and there was interest in doing away with some of the positions altogether.

That seems like a no-brainer.

They noted that 9 of the 37 Rapporteurs authored the “Yogyakarta Principles” which promote homosexual rights as international human rights, and also noted that three special Rapporteurs, including Paul Hunt, are members of the pro-abortion NGO Center for Reproductive Rights’ (CRR) Expert Litigation Committee.

However, some people fail to see the obvious.

The Human Rights Council deadline for determining whether to continue mandates for special Rapporteurs is June 18.

The mandate of any world body should be to address real human rights violations around the world.