RUTHFULLY YOURS

After a review of Libya’s human rights record Tuesday morning, HRC members exhibited their moral decay when they lavished praised on the North African dictatorship of Libyan strongman Muammar Gadaffi. Almost simultaneously, it adopted a report containing 228 recommendations regarding America’s human rights situation.

The recommendations are based on criticisms from other countries and NGOs, some of which undoubtedly harbor anti-American sentiments. State Department legal adviser Harold Kohl alluded to the report’s political background when he called some of the recommendations “political provocations.”

But the HRC’s political bias and the questionable morality of some of its members did not prevent Michael Posner, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, from spending three hours testifying before it last Friday. As if that wasn’t humiliating enough, it was equally embarrassing Posner acknowledged before such human rights disasters as Cuba, Mauritania and Angola that there was “imperfection” in America’s human rights record.

“Though we are proud of our achievements, we are not satisfied with the status quo,” Posner said.

Considering the HRC’s political nature, one could almost have written the report condemning the United States in advance. According to one account, it included the usual indictments such as the Guantanamo Bay prison facility and accusations of torture against the US military. Also mentioned was overcrowding in American prisons, the need to ratify international conventions on women and children and that “discrimination permeates all aspects of life in the U.S.” All in all, standard accusations from the leftist, anti-American playbook.

The report on Libya, on the other hand, reflected a human rights paradise. The report drew praise from other UN members, including such paragons of human rights as Iran, which stated: “Libya has achieved significant progress in the promotion and protection of human rights at the national level, especially in such areas human rights legislation.” Syria, another bastion of domestic and international virtue, gushed that Libya’s “unique experience in democracy …has allowed for the growth and development and promotion of human rights in full conformity with its commitment under international law…”

Human rights organizations acquainted with Muammar Gadaffi’s Libya, however, are not hiding their anger about the glossing over of its atrocious human rights record and the farce that just occurred at the UN.

“Libya’s report seeks to cover up its well-documented practices of torture, violations of religion, attacks on migrants and refugees, oppression of journalists and opposition politicians, and the discrimination against women,” said Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, a Geneva-based group that monitors the United Nations.