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Jimmy Carter Favors U.N. Over U.S.
Former President Jimmy Carter has sided with the likes of Cuba and Egypt and is pressing for a vote in the United Nations against American policy regarding the U.N. Human Rights Commission. At a recent dinner he attended in New York, Carter discussed the ongoing negotiations concerning an attempt to replace the ineffectual Geneva-based commission with a more accountable Human Rights Council. Carter assured guests at the dinner – including the ambassadors from Cuba, Pakistan and Egypt – that the U.S. would not dominate all other nations in the council, the New York Sun reports. But the next day, American’s U.N. Ambassador John Bolton demanded that the five permanent members of the Security Council have permanent seats on the new council.
Story Continues Below Carter told the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday that Bolton’s demand "subverted exactly what I have promised” the ambassadors. Carter said he called Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and she told him Bolton’s statement was not going to be honored. Despite that assurance, Bolton’s stance "became American policy,” the Sun reports. Carter told the Council: "My hope is that when the vote is taken, the other members will outvote the United States.” Bolton has said that the new council must be a clear departure from the discredited Human Rights Commission or efforts to improve the protection of human rights will be undermined, NewsMax reported in January. Carter’s opposition to U.S. efforts to reform the commission is hard to fathom. Some of the world’s worst violators of basic human rights have won seats on the commission, and current members include Sudan, which is carrying out genocide, and Nepal, whose monarch has suspended basic liberties.
Publications that customarily do not support the Bush administration or Bolton, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have come out in support of Bolton’s efforts. The Times declared in an editorial: "When it comes to reforming the disgraceful United Nations Human Rights Commission, America’s ambassador, Jon Bolton, is right.”
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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