As you can see, Austria, France and Sweden beat the USA in the field of human rights. As is well known around the world, those countries do not soil human rights with misguided decisions to proliferate psychonivorous cults.

Thursday May 3 4:31 PM ET
U.S. Loses Seat on U.N. Rights Commission
By Evelyn Leopold UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States, for the first time since 1947, failed to win re-election on Thursday to the key Geneva-based Human Rights Commission that probes rights abuses throughout the world. Instead France, Austria and Sweden were chosen for the three seats allocated to Western countries that were up for election. The balloting was conducted in secret among 53 nations voting in the Economic and Social Council, the parent group for the rights commission, U.N. officials said.

``Understandably, we are very disappointed,'' James Cunningham, the chief U.S. representative, told reporters, declining to speculate on the reason for the defeat.

"It was an election between a number of solid candidates,'' Cunningham said. ``We very much wanted to serve on the committee.'' The commission was created in 1947 and the United States, Russia and India had served on the body ever since. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Franklin D.

Roosevelt, was the first U.S. delegate to the commission, which issued the landmark Univers al Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

On Thursday, the United States came in fourth in the balloting among Western nations with 29 votes. France was high scorer with 52 votes, followed by Austria with 41 and Sweden with 32. Rita Lowey, a Democratic Congresswoman from New York, said the defeat was an ``embarrassment for our country'' and said George W. Bush had ``dragged his feet'' in getting key foreign policy officials confirmed, including a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations expected to be John Negroponte.

``The U.S. commitment to human rights has fallen victim to the administration's laissez-faire attitude toward diplomacy and foreign policy,'' she said in a statement. Singapore's ambassador, Kishore Mahbubani, called the vote ''a stunning development ... when I heard it, I couldn't believe it,'' he said. And British Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock, whose country has a seat of the commission, said he hoped the U.S. defeat was an ``aberration'' but noted elections at the United Nations often involved doing deals.

``This can mean less focus on the suitability of candidates. The U.S. has tended not to be keen on doing deals,'' he said.

``There are always some who want to strike out at the United States as the only super-power but most U.N. members recognize its importance,'' Greenstock said. Some Western diplomats said the Bush administration's opposition to the Kyoto climate change treaty as well as its plans for a missile defense shield, contributed to the loss. But Joanna Weschler, the U.N. representative of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said both Western and developing countries bore grudges against the United States.

``Washington should have seen it coming because there has been a growing resentment toward the United States and votes on key human rights standards, including opposition to a treaty to abolish land mines and to the International Criminal Court and making AIDS drugs available to everyone,'' she said.

Other nations the United States has held up to the spotlight in the Geneva commission, such as China or Cuba, resented U.S. actions on the committee and ``made their feelings well known in their speeches,'' she said in an interview. Weschler also said the 53-member commission was turning into an ``abuser solidarity'' group with more and more countries with questionable human rights records gaining election and then voting as a bloc against singling out individual nations for human rights abuses.

Also elected to the human rights commission on Thursday were Bahrain, South Korea, Pakistan, Croatia and Armenia. Chile, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo and Uganda won uncontested seats. Countries whose candidates failed to get seats were Iran, Saudi Ar abia, Latvia, and Azerbaijan in addition to the United States.

--- Joe Cisar: http://cisar.org/rfs0100.htm
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