Mutasim Ali, legal advisor at the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights opposes Sudan’s candidacy to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Irwin Cotler, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, said: “Regrettably, when the UN itself ends up electing human rights violators to the Human Rights Council, it indulges the very of culture of impunity it is supposed to combat”.
NEW YORK OCTOBER 11: Mutasim Ali, legal advisor at the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights spoke at UN Watch’s Oct. 3, 2022 media briefing in New York about the upcoming U.N. Human Rights Council elections.
Abuses by Sudan are detailed described in a new joint NGO report published October 3 by UN Watch, Human Rights Foundation and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, which is being circulated to UN diplomats.
Because there is no competition in the African regional group, with four candidates for four available seats, Algeria and Sudan, both rated as “Not Free” by Freedom House, are almost guaranteed to win, unless member states make the exceptional move of refusing to endorse candidates running on a clean slate.
Irwin Cotler, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, and former Canadian minister of justice, said: “Regrettably, when the UN itself ends up electing human rights violators to the Human Rights Council, it indulges the very of culture of impunity it is supposed to combat. The world’s democracies must join in the preservation and protection of the Council’s mandate, and not end up accomplices to its breach.”
– “As made clear in our report, voting nations can and should refrain from electing rights abusers to the UN’s highest human rights body. We need to hear the US and EU member states lead the call to oppose the worst abusers. So far, at least in the public arena, they have been silent.”
UN Watch is proposing a major reform to the election system. “If our own democracies continue to disregard the election criteria by voting for abusers,” said Neuer, “then we should just scrap elections altogether, and make every country a member, as is the case in the General Assembly’s human rights committee. Non-democracies could no longer hold up their UNHRC election as a shield of international legitimacy to cover up the abuses of their regime.”
