Human Rights Applies to All

It’s no fun to be put in your place. It’s all the worse if you’re a big shot. Take it from the fly on the wall who watched it happen to the Asian Development Bank, the bagmen for Japanese bribes to Asian Security Council members. In retrospect, the rising sun had just begun to set. ADB came a cropper on the ground floor of the Bank of China (they don’t let foreigners upstairs.) Very good tea, insufficient time to savor it, as the whole thing was over in no time, a spanking and a bum’s rush. Pretensions popped more loudly and abruptly than balloons.

Who needs you? Do you measure up? Even when they break it to you gently, it’s hard to take. Get lost — the humblest bodhisattva hates to hear it. Imagine the discomfiture when it happens to a brittle, narcissistic junta like the USA.

In 2001 the UN gave the US government a tyke’s time-out. The UN’s Economic and Social Council squeezed the US off the Human Rights Commission and gave its seat to Europeans. As the US raged in mortifying tantrums, the UN member nations methodically revamped their system of peer review, superseding the Commission with a Human Rights Council: an elective body authorized to examine all UN members, the US along with everybody else. America as a unique, perfect little snowflake with a special lofty role, that’s anold man’s idea from the duck-and-cover days of yore and it won’t fly in the great wide world. In Universal Periodic Review (UPR), the Council tests every UN member — not just against its commitments, the human rights pacts it has signed, but against the complete scope of its obligations, the universally-acknowledged duties of any sovereign state. If you want to cut through the fustian of ‘soft power’ or ‘leadership,’ there is no more comprehensive way to specify a nation’s standing in the world.

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