Most news outlets indicated that there were more strigent qualifications for elections to the council replacing the Human Rights Commission, which was a misnomer.
The LA Times (article via Sfgate.com) chose the moment to use a little moral relativism with:
The NY Times headlined with:The United States decided not to run for a seat after voting against creation of the council because it believed the body needed stronger barriers to keep human rights abusers from gaining a place.
Critics have suggested that the United States might not have won a seat at all in a year when it is under investigation by the U.N. body for its treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
New UN Rights Group Includes Six Nations With Poor RecordsABC News went with:
Cuba, Saudis, China on Rights CouncilBrett D. Schaefer via NRO went with an analytical approach and the most appropriate headline:
Human Rights ReduxNo wonder we cannot count on the UN with Iran, but did we truly believe we could?
ppalled by the ineffectiveness of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which had been used by human-rights abusers to shield themselves from scrutiny or sanction, the United States last year led an effort to replace the discredited Commission with a new Human Rights Council (HRC). Sadly, negotiations in the United Nations over the new HRC resulted in a disappointing body that failed to adopt any meaningful criteria for membership and left the body vulnerable to the same manipulation by human-rights abusers that plague the old Commission.
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UN Human Rights Council
DeMediacrat
Iran
Islamofascism
War On Terror
