UN human rights chief criticises security council over global conflicts | World news | ... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...-council-over-global-conflicts
International Relations United Nations UN world news
shared by Blair Peterson on 28 Aug 14
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“These crises hammer home the full cost of the international community’s failure to prevent conflict,” Pillay said. “None of these crises erupted without warning.”
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Pillay said Syria’s conflict “is metastasing outwards in an uncontrollable process whose eventual limits we cannot predict”. She also cited conflicts in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Ukraine and Gaza.
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The resolution acknowledged that the United Nations has not always used the tools in its charter for preventing conflict. It prescribed several steps for improvement, focusing on addressing human rights violations earlier and recognizing that such abuses are often warning signs of looming conflicts.
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The resolution said little about the political differences that often paralyze the security council, where sharp divisions between veto-holding members Russia and the United States have often thwarted action on Syria and Ukraine.
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“Short-term geopolitical considerations and national interest, narrowly defined, have repeatedly taken precedence over intolerable human suffering and grave breaches of and long-term threats to international peace and security,”
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The human rights chief said the use of veto power on the security council “to stop action intended to prevent or defuse conflict is a short-term and ultimately counter-productive tactic”.
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And she suggested building on the Arms Trade Treaty by requiring that, in countries where there are human rights concerns, governments accept a small human rights monitoring team as a condition of purchasing weapons.