Fury after Saudi Arabia 'chosen to head key UN human rights panel' | Hacker News Reader

Fury after Saudi Arabia 'chosen to head key UN human rights panel'

independent.co.uk

57 pointssnowy18 comments

It almost seems like someone in the UN is just trolling the world with this pick.

Saudi Arabia's atrocious record on women's rights, and KSA's institutionalized mistreatment of foreign workers (employers hold the passports of foreign workers and can deny them exit visas in any dispute) are just two of a huge number of other issues too voluminous to enumerate.

EDIT: Not to mention that in Saudi Arabia, conversion from Islam to any other religion is officially punishable by death.

EDIT2: Just this week, a juvenile human rights protester in KSA had his appeal denied, and will be executed by crucifixion: http://www.mintpressnews.com/saudi-arabia-juvenile-prisoner-...

It's difficult to conceive that a worse pick could possibly have been chosen. The inmates running the asylum...

It is just ridiculous. Saudi has capacity to accommodate 2 million people in Mecca, but they would not accept single refugee from Syria. Instead they offered to build hundreds of mosques in Germany and Europe, to export their version of Islam.

Edit: Saudi accepted many refugees, so I would like to apologize.

Taking into account how the war in Syria was financed, I think it would be fitting for those refugees to stay in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, ...

Saudi Arabia have claimed this is misleading. They say they have an open border to Syria and have accepted over 2.5 million Syrians since 2011.

Is this claim incorrect?

Do you have source for 2.5? I only found 0.5M, but it seems like those are expats who did not moved in recently.

> There are 500,000 Syrians in Saudi Arabia, according to Nabil Othman, acting regional representative to the Gulf region at the UNHCR. In official documentation they are referred to as “Arab brothers and sisters in distress,” he said.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-04/syria-s-re...

They claim 2.5 million here:

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/09/19/saudi-arabia-h...

This is the same country that declared atheists as terrorists. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-ar...)

Also, they tried to get a United Nations-backed ban on "blasphemy". (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/15/us-islam-blasphemy-...)

I dislike Saudi Arabia as much as the next sane person, but that "atheists are terrorist" article is april fools. Look at the date.

Though the publication date of that article would suggest that it is an April fools; it actually refers to an amendment made in March to a "royal decree" announced in January[1] 2014 that defines as a terrorist act, punishable by death:

“Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based.”

1: https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/03/20/saudi-arabia-new-terrori...

It's like letting oil companies run studies about environmental impact.

I remember there was a similar row a couple of years ago with an other country with a bad human rights record. An argument then was that the position carries little real power, but is a way for a country to show that they want to improve their human rights, and other countries allow it as a way to put some soft pressure on the selected country.

Libya in 2003: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=5924

And at the same time, we have many in the US demanding that we support the UN in all things.

It's disappointing that they put so much faith in an obviously broken organization.. that is also completely unaccountable to its member countries and the world as a whole.

This is crazy. It would be like choosing America to head up the UN Social Welfare Commission.

(edit: this was meant to be a mildly sarcastic zinger, if it wasn't clear)

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