United States Defeated at HRC

GENEVA , April 1, 2007.- An analysis of the recently concluded 4th Human Rights Council sessions, held in this city, proves that the United States and its allies were the great losers in this international meeting.

Although the Council must continue until June indispensable negotiations to determine the definitive institutional construction of the organization, an analysis of the result of these sessions and approved resolutions confirm the previous statement.

Washington, without being a member of this institution and not even gathering the necessary votes last year, used repeatedly the right to speak during these plenary sessions and was represented to vote mainly by the European Union.

But the White House' policy to influence on those decisions to be adopted in Geneva suffered, since the first time, important setbacks.

Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque denounced, in the Top Level segment, US plans to delay definitions on the Council's methods and forms of functioning that must be different of those used for its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission.

That institution disappeared amid the lack of credibility in campaigns against the southern countries, based on the use of double standard and the selectivity to analyze the situation of human rights.

Perez Roque's accusation called the attention on the topic due to its arguments and the impossibility to accept that the new entity was born affected by the same defects of the defenestrated Commission, only to please control wishes by United States.

Illegal detentions in different countries and the CIA secret flights with prisoners from the denounced prison and torture center in the illegal US naval base of Guantanamo, Cuba, were repeated at the plenary session and was a base to also approve a resolution.

With 32 votes for and 12 against, the plenary session adopted a Cuban project requesting the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, to pay attention to the accord on violation of those prerogatives through unilateral coercive measures.

The document expressed the Council's concern due to its expressions of intolerance and discrimination on religion and beliefs and the defamation campaign against religions and Muslim minorities after the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York.

Finally, the plenary session listened to the voice of relatives of five Cuban anti-terrorist fighters imprisoned in US jails, which emphasized their unfair sentences and visas denial to their wives, mothers and sons. By Javier Rodriguez

(Cubaminrex-PL)