Cuba on Wednesday cheered the new U.N. human rights watchdog’s agreement to stop monitoring alleged abuses on the island, with Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque saying the decision left the United States “hanging, and we yanked away the ladder.”
The U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva agreed Tuesday to discontinue investigations into the rights situation in Cuba and Belarus, but to continue monitoring Israel. The move drew immediate fire from the U.S., which has crusaded to focus attention on the human rights situation in Cuba.
At a news conference, Perez Roque called the decision “a resounding, undisputed, and historic victory” that “defeats the manipulations of the United States against Cuba in Geneva.”
Cuba is famous for imprisoning political activists, artists and journalists who don’t toe Castro’s line on political and social issues. The island nation if famous for torturing them as well, not to mention promoting a political and economic structure that has kept most of the island’s residents in abject poverty and near starvation. Conditions there are so bad that Cuba’s citizens routinely risk the stormy and shark-infested waters between the island and Florida, usually in rafts made of everything from used to tires to old cars, on the off-chance that they might make it to our shores and find asylum.
But the UN has decided that the middle east’s only liberal Democracy, Israel, is the real human rights troublemaker to keep an eye on.
Tell me again why we should even bother to continue our funding of the UN?