EU should show the door to some of its members...

It is time for the EU to consider the expulsion of Hungary from the union. The country is run by the FIDESZ party, by now an extreme right governing body.

FIDESZ was founded in 1988, originally as a liberal youth movement with stars in their eyes, aiming at political power. They had a shaky start, defeated in several elections and, after taking the pulse of the country, they decided that it is more advantageous for them to become a conservative movement. In 1995 they officially became right wing. Their first success came in 1998, when they managed to become the governing party by entering into a coalition with two smaller parties. Then they lost again in 2002. After this loss the party decided to tap into the ultra nationalist sentiments that were rekindled after the passing of the Communist era. These ideologies, remnants of pre-WWII times, were kept under the lid during Communism but they never died. When Communism fell, these ideas resurfaced as fresh as if decades have never passed in-between.

In the summer of 2007 the German magazine Spiegel called the newly formed Magyar Garda, "Hungary's shame". Unfortunately FIDESZ rose to power by winning the with a 54% vote in 2010 thanks to the support of these groups. Then again, 54% is clearly a majority, and it is rather fitting when people say "a country deserves their government".

As it was the second time around for the party, they did not waste time in implementing their agendas. Within the first year they raised concerns in the rest of Europe, calling Hungary a "Fuhrerstaat". The media law is enforced by a national media authority that wields unprecedented power over radio, TV, newsprint, even online material. But the real heavyweight is the new constitution, adopted in April last year. According to this New York Times article, it's clear that Hungary is slipping into authoritarianism.

During this time Hungary happened to have its turn for the EU presidency. During that time, Orban showed a different face to the international community than to his supporters at home. He feigned allegiance to principles in Brussels which he repeatedly denounced at home, both before and since. Orban is very good though to at playing one side against the other while he appears to emerge from all that stronger and victorious.

2012 started with growing opposition among Hungary's extreme right to the membership in the EU. Today's March 15 celebrations were the final icing on the cake. During his speech, Viktor Orban declared that he will not allow foreign powers to turn Hungary into a colony. Since the European Union is a body which all member states joined voluntarily, it is just natural that if they wanted to leave they should. For the sake of European dignity it would be beneficial to politely ask Hungary to go in the direction of the back door.

But it does not stop there. Hundreds of Polish guests were treated to a free holiday in Budapest for the March 15 celebrations. They belong to the Polish right and they consider Orban an example whom their leader, Jaroslaw Kaczinsky should follow. They were asked to participate in the demonstrations so the international media could report their enthusiastic support of the Hungarian government.

There is a great article in Telos that points out the reasons for the anti-liberal populist movements in East Europe, and it also explains that "all is not lost", things could still turn out all right. Maybe...

Geneva Summit for Human Rights

Unfortunately I became aware of this live webcast only today. I will post it in other places also but if you chance on my blog in time I encourage you to watch it tomorrow, March 13. It will be going on from 9:00 to 17:39 Geneva time. A link to the webcast will appear on the Summit homepage just before the start.

New York Times article by Judge R. Goldstone

Richard J. Goldstone, a former justice of the South African Constitutional Court, led the United Nations fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-9. At the time he focused mainly on Gaza, which then resulted in the infamous 500-page U.N. report that bears his name: the accusation that Israeli leaders deliberately targeted civilians during the 2009 war with Hamas. In April this year Judge Goldstone publicly retracted the core charge of the report in an article published in the Washington Post. That article, as well as this new one which I post here in its entirety, resulted in vicious personal attacks from certain members of the U.N. Human Rights Council, a fact that further proves their terribly biased position. Let us hope that a lot of people who will read this article will have the moral fortitude to accept the actual truth.

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Israel and the Apartheid Slander

Nov. 1, 2011

By RICHARD J. GOLDSTONE

THE Palestinian Authority’s request for full United Nations membership has put hope for any two-state solution under increasing pressure. The need for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians has never been greater. So it is important to separate legitimate criticism of Israel from assaults that aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize it.

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues “apartheid” policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a “hearing” on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a “tribunal.” The “evidence” is going to be one-sided and the members of the “jury” are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

While “apartheid” can have broader meaning, its use is meant to evoke the situation in pre-1994 South Africa. It is an unfair and inaccurate slander against Israel, calculated to retard rather than advance peace negotiations.

I know all too well the cruelty of South Africa’s abhorrent apartheid system, under which human beings characterized as black had no rights to vote, hold political office, use “white” toilets or beaches, marry whites, live in whites-only areas or even be there without a “pass.” Blacks critically injured in car accidents were left to bleed to death if there was no “black” ambulance to rush them to a “black” hospital. “White” hospitals were prohibited from saving their lives.

In assessing the accusation that Israel pursues apartheid policies, which are by definition primarily about race or ethnicity, it is important first to distinguish between the situations in Israel, where Arabs are citizens, and in West Bank areas that remain under Israeli control in the absence of a peace agreement.

In Israel, there is no apartheid. Nothing there comes close to the definition of apartheid under the 1998 Rome Statute: “Inhumane acts ... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” Israeli Arabs — 20 percent of Israel’s population — vote, have political parties and representatives in the Knesset and occupy positions of acclaim, including on its Supreme Court. Arab patients lie alongside Jewish patients in Israeli hospitals, receiving identical treatment.

To be sure, there is more de facto separation between Jewish and Arab populations than Israelis should accept. Much of it is chosen by the communities themselves. Some results from discrimination. But it is not apartheid, which consciously enshrines separation as an ideal. In Israel, equal rights are the law, the aspiration and the ideal; inequities are often successfully challenged in court.

The situation in the West Bank is more complex. But here too there is no intent to maintain “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group.” This is a critical distinction, even if Israel acts oppressively toward Palestinians there. South Africa’s enforced racial separation was intended to permanently benefit the white minority, to the detriment of other races. By contrast, Israel has agreed in concept to the existence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and almost all of the West Bank, and is calling for the Palestinians to negotiate the parameters.

But until there is a two-state peace, or at least as long as Israel’s citizens remain under threat of attacks from the West Bank and Gaza, Israel will see roadblocks and similar measures as necessary for self-defense, even as Palestinians feel oppressed. As things stand, attacks from one side are met by counterattacks from the other. And the deep disputes, claims and counterclaims are only hardened when the offensive analogy of “apartheid” is invoked.

Those seeking to promote the myth of Israeli apartheid often point to clashes between heavily armed Israeli soldiers and stone-throwing Palestinians in the West Bank, or the building of what they call an “apartheid wall” and disparate treatment on West Bank roads. While such images may appear to invite a superficial comparison, it is disingenuous to use them to distort the reality. The security barrier was built to stop unrelenting terrorist attacks; while it has inflicted great hardship in places, the Israeli Supreme Court has ordered the state in many cases to reroute it to minimize unreasonable hardship. Road restrictions get more intrusive after violent attacks and are ameliorated when the threat is reduced.

Of course, the Palestinian people have national aspirations and human rights that all must respect. But those who conflate the situations in Israel and the West Bank and liken both to the old South Africa do a disservice to all who hope for justice and peace.

Jewish-Arab relations in Israel and the West Bank cannot be simplified to a narrative of Jewish discrimination. There is hostility and suspicion on both sides. Israel, unique among democracies, has been in a state of war with many of its neighbors who refuse to accept its existence. Even some Israeli Arabs, because they are citizens of Israel, have at times come under suspicion from other Arabs as a result of that longstanding enmity.

The mutual recognition and protection of the human dignity of all people is indispensable to bringing an end to hatred and anger. The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony.

Alternate Human Rights Summit in New York

Read this powerful op-ed below by human rights hero Yang Jianli, appearing in the Sept. 19 edition of the New York Daily News. It explains why UN Watch and 20 partner groups are holding a major human rights summit this week in New York. For more information, visit www.ngosummit.org.

The UN's red carpet for tyrants: We're hosting our own assembly where repression isn't welcome.

BY YANG JIANLI

Monday, September 19th 2011

United Nations General Assembly, held annually in New York, is a permanent fixture of the diplomatic calendar. Just as inevitably, in the year that passes between each session, the world undergoes changes on a scale from the significant to the enormous.

This Wednesday, when President Obama opens the general debate of the Assembly's 66th session, those changes will impact most visibly upon the roster of world leaders not in attendance.

Few, for example, will forget Libyan Col. Moammar Khadafy's 2009 appearance, when he delivered a rambling, 1-1/2-hour speech, tossed aside a copy of the UN charter and called the Security Council a "terror council."

In 2011, Khadafy's regime will be invisible. His key UN diplomats already defected in February.

Similarly, thanks to the political convulsions across the Middle East, other repressive regimes - from Egypt, from Tunisia - will be absent this year, never to return.

Even so, for every collapsed tyrannical regime, there are several more that have retained power. And they, too, will be represented in New York, and treated with all the respect we afford duly elected leaders of constitutional, multiparty democracies.

From the Middle East, their number includes Syria, Sudan and Iran - whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will be attending the Assembly for the seventh year in a row.

More broadly, this club of tyrannies includes Zimbabwe, Cuba and, of course, my own country, China, a Security Council member.

This depressing reality underlines the greatest challenge of the UN system, which has never distinguished between democracies and dictatorships - despite the fact that the UN is sworn to universally uphold the same human rights for all peoples, regardless of where they live.

Given this paradox, how is meaningful action possible on urgent human rights violations, such as China's brutal crackdown this year on citizens who dared to peacefully gather for walks around Chinese cities?

The GA's prearranged agenda precludes such discussions. When the world body does make the news, it's about the outrageous theatrics of its participants: Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust, say, or Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez suggesting that former President George W. Bush was Satan.

The UN's bloc of authoritarian states are all too powerful to prevent the democratic impulses sweeping the world from surfacing in the world body. Back in March, after Libya was finally suspended from the UN's Human Rights Council, I had occasion to address that body. Recalling the case of Liu Xiaobo, a writer serving an 11-year jail sentence for advocating freedom, I asked how China's Communist regime, whose victims run into the millions, could remain as a member. I was interrupted by China and Cuba and never received an answer.

That is one of the many reasons why I will be joining an international coalition of dissidents and human rights organizations in New York this week. Led by UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that works the UN's corridors on behalf of human rights victims across the world, we will hold a parallel summit to combat discrimination and persecution. It'll take place within a stone's throw of the UN's headquarters on the banks of the East River.

Like me, many of the summit's participants are dissidents who were imprisoned for the sole crime of promoting democracy.

Rebiya Kadeer, the voice of China's oppressed Uyghur minority, was jailed for five years, two of them in solitary confinement. Ahmad Batebi, an icon of Iran's student democracy movement, was tortured for eight years in an Iranian prison. The mullahs never forgave the July 17, 1999, cover of The Economist, showing a photo of Batebi with the bloodied T-shirt of his friend, shot at a peaceful rally. Grace Kwinjeh, the Zimbabwean dissident and journalist, was tortured in prison by President Robert Mugabe's thugs. Now in exile, she fights the regime's victimization of women.

These and other participants, like Berta Antunes of Cuba and Jacqueline Kasha of Uganda, took extraordinary risks for the causes they represent.

Together, we will produce a series of proposed human rights resolutions for the UN to adopt, based upon a common principle: The use of fear as an instrument of government must be banished forever.

Freedom from fear was promised by the UN in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rest assured that until this basic freedom is taken seriously in those halls, our voices will ring loud.

Jianli is a leading Chinese human rights advocate. An eyewitness to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, he now lives in the United States, where he founded Initiatives for China, a pro-democracy organization.

Link to New York Daily News

The case of Liu Xiaobo vs. the case of Hossein Derakshan

It was a courageous act that the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee was ready to jeopardize their country's relations with China by standing up for and honouring Liu Xiaobo. I noted with satisfaction that the Canadian government issued a statement way back in December 2005 deploring Liu Xiaobo's 11 year prison sentence, in spite of the fact that Mr Liu is not a Canadian citizen. But it saddens me to compare his case with that of Hossein Derakshan, who IS a Canadian citizen, and who was recently sentenced to 19.5 years in Iran. His crime? He was blogging, in Canada, posting critical writings about the present Iranian leadership.

Both are dissidents, both expressed critical opinions on matters of human rights. Surely Liu Xiaobo's political activities are of a heavier weight, culminating in this year's Nobel Peace Prize, while Hossein Derakshan only contributed to freedom of expression for Iranians by being instrumental in developing the use of Persian script on the internet, as well as then using this tool to voice his own opinions later. Liu Xiaobo's 11 year sentence elicited an immediate reaction from the Canadian government, yet seemingly not much reaction came from them when the news of Hossein Derakshan's possible death sentence, which later was downgraded to a 19.5 years(!) prison sentence, hit the news stands.

Wouldn't he deserve at least an official notice, not to speak maybe help from his own government?

Ahmadinejad's UN speech

Mr Ahmadinejad has done it again. This is already beyond comprehension!

I am thinking of two possible explanations. Either he is what he appears to be, but then it puzzles me why Iran's political forces behind him still uphold him in his present position; or there is some rhyme and reason behind the apparent madness, maybe it is a very calculated modus operandi. But then, of course, that begs the question: to what aim?

In either case, after discussions today with some of my Iranian-Canadian friends and acquaintances, a rather embarrassing and painful period in Iranian history is unfolding in front of our eyes...

PS. By the way, as immediate proof of his lack of information / lies / machinations (pick one at your discretion) as far as his assumptions go regarding world opinion about the 9/11 attacks on the US, please read the survey conducted by World Public Opinion.org on opinions in different corners of the world as to who people think is really behind those attacks.

Hossein threatened by the death penalty

This is a disgrace! How low can a country, or rather its leadership, sink? Not enough that our Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was imprisoned and "accidentally" killed in 2003, not enough that the ensuing murder trial was handled with "flagrant denial of due process", as observed by Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister, Bill Graham. Now we have to receive news of Canadian blogger Hossein Derakshan being in danger of execution. He is accused of "collaborating with enemy states (sic?), creating propaganda against the Islamic regime, insulting religious sanctity, and creating propaganda for anti-revolutionary groups". In simpler terms: exercising his right as a Canadian, while within Canada, to free speech.

We cannot let this happen! If anything, it is Iran that is insulting us now. For how long will we allow this regime to repeatedly throw filth in the face of the international community? What do they want to achieve by these rogue actions? If it goes on like this, it will be embarrassing for any Iranian when outside their country to admit to being Iranian... Shame!