The U.N.’s Mission and Human Rights
It is extremely difficulty that the United Nations Organization might fulfill reasonably well the mission that was entrusted to it when it was founded in San Francisco, in 1945, with 50 member countries. Today it has 192 members many of whose governments do not respond to the ideals that spurred the creation of this world organization. Moreover, not only don’t they answer to those ideals, they act against them.
Something that was innovative at the time, the Charter of the United Nations categorically mentions the peoples and not the governments. In seven different part of the Charter is mentioned, precisely, the ideological significance of mentioning the peoples on whose behalf – and not on behalf of the governments – the institution was created and the Charter signed.
When there are confrontations within the U.N. between those who advocate freedom and those who are against it, between those who defend human rights and those who violate them, when the time comes for the votes to be counted, the generous causes of freedom and of the dignity of human rights are defeated.
It is important that in the sessions of the 62nd General Assembly that just began, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, has emphasized, albeit the brevity of this type of speech, the lack of freedom in several countries, among them Cuba, that has been oppressed by a dictatorship for almost forty-nine years now. When an international committee or panel is created in the U.N., the members of the Cuban delegation are included, even when the subject is human rights. This, of course, is an absolute ideological incongruity because a government that is characterized by the systematic violation of those human rights should not be part of a commission that purportedly defends those rights. This inclusion of delegates from the Cuban government is an irrefutable proof of the ideological crisis that seriously affects the world organization.
This constitutes a mockery with respect to the juridical, political, and social culture of the civilized world. There should be no room in the United Nations organization for anti-democratic governments that violate human rights and even less in specific commissions created to defend human dignity.
