Tag Archives: Topic: United Nations

Michael Curtis at the Gatestone Institute: Support for people who criticize their own Western democratic societies is now all too apparent among many Western intellectuals, academics, members of the media, international organizations, and religious groups which, while refusing to challenge cases of injustice, particularly in Muslim countries, instead criticize and condemn the state of Israel at every turn, despite the continuing physical and rhetorical aggression against it.

LifeSiteNews (video embedded): Turner had to answer for his history of provocative statements, and made a few new ones, when members of the website WeAreChange.org caught up with him on camera late last month.

C-FAM: In the midst of criticism for failing to properly prioritize, Navi Pillay, the UN’s top human rights official, released a video last month focusing on “homophobia and transphobia.” In it Pillay demands countries repeal “discriminatory” laws and practices and …

Rasmussen: Russia, China and several Arab countries are pushing for international control of the Internet through the United Nations, but U.S. voters overwhelmingly oppose the idea.

The Center for Reproductive Rights has this post indicating that the United Nations is targeting Peru over its abortion policies.

Paul.House.Gov: Of course, the idea that the administration should follow the Constitution and seek a Declaration of War from Congress is considered even more anachronistic now than under the previous administration.

Washington Times: US officials, lawmakers and technology leaders offered a resounding “no” Thursday to proposals to bring the Internet under United Nations’ control and said they would lead efforts to stop the move. …

AP: Pakistani judges are often pressured to convict people accused under the country’s blasphemy laws that call for the death penalty for anyone insulting Islam, a special U.N. representative said Tuesday.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: They were inspired by the reports of the Club of Rome, a think tank that unites Heads of States, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, scientists and business leaders who claim they “share a common concern for the future of humanity and the planet.”

UN News Centre: Marking International Day against Homophobia, senior United Nations officials today drew attention to laws around the world which discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people, and called for equality and the repeal of such laws.

Austin Ruse and Stefano Gennarini at C-FAM: And it is true that while family planning is mentioned in three hard law treaties, it is not defined as including contraception. Does it follow that we have nothing to fear from these phrases and that we should in fact embrace them?

Phyllis Schlafly at Townhall: The stunning repudiation of Sen. Richard Lugar’s, R-Ind., bid for a seventh term has sent shock waves through Washington’s internationalist lobby . . . Americans today are in no mood for subordinating U.S. sovereignty, plus seven-tenths of the world’s surface area, to another entangling global bureaucracy, so advocates are using Orwellian talking points to pretend that LOST would do the opposite.

Piero Tozzi at C-FAM: My colleagues at the Friday Fax reported last week that the “Latex Left” lost at the just ended UN Commission on the Population and Development, that they came away “empty handed.” With respect, I disagree with this assessment. International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and its allies scored a victory. What they got was a (non-binding) declaration setting funding priorities that calls for “comprehensive” sexual education for youth and adolescents, marginalized parental involvement, and increased funding for “reproductive health-care services, commodities and supplies.”

Benjamin Bull at American Thinker: Several days ago, I noted with interest that Danish journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard has been acquitted by a unanimous Dutch Supreme Court of charges that he violated Holland’s notorious “hate speech” laws. His crime? He made a public utterance that state prosecutors concluded was “denigrating” of Islam.

Human Events: After regaling a group of environmentalists last week on military initiatives to pursue biofuels and prepare for climate change, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta advanced another tenet of a far-left military agenda Wednesday when he appeared at a forum to push for ratification of the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. The treaty would create an international regime of law to dictate actions and activities on and in the oceans

San Francisco Chronicle: As President Obama struggles with the politics of gay issues at home, his administration is drawing cheers from human rights groups for its commitment to gay rights around the globe.

LifeSiteNews: “The State should respect the choices that parents make for their children and avoid attempts at ideological indoctrination,” the permanent observer mission of the Holy See to the United Nations wrote in a statement released last Tuesday.

AP on Findlaw: Israel’s Foreign Ministry has criticized a U.N. statement that places the country on a list of nations it says are moving to further restrict advocacy and rights groups.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Delegates at the UN witnessing the push to put population control in the Rio+20 document could take a warning coming from India, the nation who has implemented it zeaolously for decades.

CNSNews: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday that millions of girls — teenagers and younger — need access to abortion and contraceptives in order to “avoid unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and sexually transmitted infections.”

C-FAM: The government of Uzbekistan is accused of running a clandestine program to forcibly sterilize women, possibly as a way to meet U.N. goals on maternal mortality.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Yesterday marked day two of a week long conference on “Adolescents and Youth” held by the UN Commission on Population and Development (CPD). While the conference is supposed to address a wide range of topics related to population, development and youth, it has focused almost exclusively on promoting the sexual and reproductive rights of youth, comprehensive sexual education, and provoking fear among countries about the burgeoning youth population in underdeveloped regions like sub-Saharan Africa.

C-FAM: Abortion groups have released a “toolkit” for activists to file “sexual rights” complaints against countries in the UN. International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and Sexual Rights Initiative (SRI), a coalition of organizations that advocate for sexual and reproductive rights at the United Nations, released the 2012 Sexual Rights toolkit to encourage advocates to document sexual and reproductive right abuses and submit reports to the UN through the Universal Periodic Review (UPR).

Piero Tozzi at Turtle Bay and Beyond: A word of caution is in order before adopting the framework and verbiage proposed by McCarthy in its entirety, however, for he throws out the baby with the bathwater, and his characterization of the “utopian” Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 fails to give a rounded appraisal of that landmark document. Moreover, his underlying premise of “freedoms” vs. “rights” is historically both incorrect and unessential to adopt in order to get to where the author wants to lead us. The concept of “rights,” properly understood, was very much part of the Founding Fathers’ vocabulary — as in the “bill of rights” (!!) and “unalienable rights” based on the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” The tension is thus not between “rights” and “freedoms,” but rather between “negative rights” and “positive” ones — a tension that is reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

BBC: The UN Security Council has called for an immediate and unconditional end to fighting on Sudan’s southern border.

Wendy Wright at Turtle Bay and Beyond: As the UN considers creating “sexual rights” for children as young as 10, a court in Brazil shows what this would mean.

AP: The U.N. human rights office is urging Chile to pass new laws against hate crimes and discrimination after the killing of a young gay man . . .

C-Fam: The UN Commission on Population and Development is considering “sexual and reproductive health and rights” for children as young as ten.

The Hill: The bill’s sponsors warned that China and Russia might seek a U.N. resolution to give authoritarian regimes censorship powers.

Religion Clause Blog: Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted two resolutions on religious liberty.

Austin Ruse at The Catholic Thing: I do not believe that sexual orientation and gender identity should become new categories of non-discrimination in international law. For this, I have been “outed” on a number of homosexual websites and blogs as supporting the murder of homosexuals.

AFP: “I think if there were major pieces of legislation that discriminated against any group, we would have to take that into account in our relationship, and it would be a cause for concern,” US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Tuesday in response to the video.

C-FAM: The United States burned diplomatic bridges during this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women by using force and deception to pass an unpopular resolution calling for international access to contraception.

Mark W. Leach at Public Discourse: Unless regulations and laws are changed, there will be fewer people with Down syndrome to celebrate on future World Down Syndrome Days, making this year the high water mark of lives with Down syndrome.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: This week the Human Rights Committee, charged with monitoring the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights began its 104th session. It affords us an opportunity to reflect on how UN Bodies are undermining both the natural law and positive law when they promote so called rights to abortion and LGBT rights . . .

ADF Attorney Piero A. Tozzi at Turtle Bay and Beyond: The annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women meeting broke up today after failing to reach consensus on “agreed conclusions” – a very rare occurrence. The impasse was due to the insistence by the United States delegation on changing language regarding “family planning” that had been agreed upon and in continuous use since the mid-1990s in favor of the term “modern forms of contraception.”

LifeSiteNews: The Vatican’s principal representative before the United Nations, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, is objecting to demands to outlaw “discrimination” against homosexuals in a report commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council, on “Discriminatory Laws and Practices and Acts of Violence against Individuals based on their Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”.

Wendy Wright at C-FAM Friday Fax: The United Nations top agencies are actively promoting two root causes of Asia’s massive gender imbalance, charged an expert on population policies this week during a UN women’s conference.

Wall Street Journal: Iran has dramatically increased executions over the past decade and abused the rights of students, women, journalists and religious minorities, according to a new United Nations report that spotlights Tehran’s crackdown on domestic dissent as the country faces an international clampdown over its nuclear ambitions.

Radio Free Europe: In a video message to council members today, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said persecution of gays is “an attack on the universal values the United Nations that I have sworn to defend and uphold.”

Al Arabaya News: African and Arab states walked out in protest Wednesday during a U.N. Human Rights Council debate on gay rights, saying that they could not legitimize homosexuality.

CNSNews: The top United Nations official in Afghanistan has raised eyebrows with comments urging disciplinary action against those found to be responsible for damaging copies of the Qur’an at the U.S. military base in Bagram.

C-FAM: Alliance Defense Fund attorney Piero Tozzi told the Friday Fax, “The UN cannot censor speech it does not agree with. Both the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and the Human Rights Committee have recently emphasized the need to protect this fundamental freedom. Why then is speech by respectful, clean cut kids on a topic vital to keeping young people healthy being censored at the UN?”

LifeNews: Yesterday a State Department press release announced the delegation they would be sending to the the 56th Session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women beginning next week at UN headquarters in New York and running two weeks.

LifeNews: Last week the Dilma Rousseff administration was pressed by CEDAW (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women) about an alleged number of 200,000 deaths of women each year because of illegal abortion in Brazil. The Brazilian representatives showed no willingness to question this patently inflated number.

C-FAM Friday Fax: During the past two weeks, a seemingly inconsequential UN oversight committee convened with undeniably consequential results. Tasked with reviewing the applications of hundreds of advocacy groups wishing to gain official status and entry into the United Nations, the committee ultimately refused to recommend the approval of several controversial pro-abortion and anti-Catholic organizations.

LifeSiteNews.com: n a report it is presenting to a United Nations committee this week in Switzerland, the Brazilian government laments that, “The distancing from conservative positions in relation to the role of men and women in our society is happening less rapidly than would be desired.”

HSLDA : Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney Viktor Kostov of Bulgaria explained that the proposed bill is radical and unnecessary. “The Child Act places excessive authority for children into the hands of the state in the name of ‘children’s rights,’ replacing the traditional role of the family in the raising of children and violating provisions in numerous international treaties.

News from The Associated Press: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says African nations should stop treating gays as “second-class citizens, or even criminals”.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: A recent oped advocating for US ratification prompted ParentalRights.org president Michael Farris to warn of renewed calls for President Obama to move to ratify before November.

BellinghamHerald.com: From U.N. chambers to the halls of the State Department, global pressure on countries to protect the rights of homosexuals and transgender people is rising.

ADF President and General Counsel Alan E. Sears at Townhall : On December 6, President Barack Obama’s support for the demands of the “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender” agenda rose to the next level when he issued a memorandum directing federal agencies abroad to “improve protections for LGBT asylum seekers and to strengthen opposition to criminalization of LGBT status or conduct.” The key phrase in the directive was Obama’s claim that so doing is but another part of the “United States’ commitment to promoting human rights.”

EuropeNews: new resolution introduced at the United Nations Human Rights Council has free speech advocates concerned about a potential backlash against religious minority groups. Previously introduced as Resolution 62/154, “Combating defamation of religion,” the piece was originally written to criminalize the criticism of religion.

Austin Ruse at LifeSiteNews.com: On the negotiating floor, I approached a Muslim ambassador and said, “This session is going all night long and its going to be very tough going. And when it gets really hard, I want you to know that right over there,” and I pointed to a section of raised seats off to the side, “twenty Christians will be praying for you.” That night this man was a tiger in defense of unborn children.

ADF Attorney Benjamin Bull Townhall : While we sit in our soft chairs watching big screen TVs and complaining that microwave popcorn takes too long to cook, activists backing the homosexual agenda relentlessly march on. Availing themselves of avenues that are notably left of center, both culturally and politically, they incrementally pursue and secure special treatment under the guise of “rights” and “equality.” And while we’ve seen this happen at many levels of government—both state and national—we err greatly if we fail to see the inroads being made on an international level as well.

C-Fam Friday Fax: Tension between free speech advocacy and efforts to curb “hate speech” has arisen over the past year as the result of recent initiatives at the United Nations (UN) and by the Obama administration.

LifeNews.com: Thanks to a recently issued document that analyzes international law, pro-life supporters possess a new and potentially powerful tool to uphold domestic laws protecting unborn human life.

Turtle Bay and Beyond – International Law, Policy, and Institutions: Currently, USAID is now in the process of creating briefs such as the “Human Rights Considerations in Addressing HIV among Men who Have Sex with Men” and funding related programs in accordance with the Presidential directive.

LifeSiteNews.com: ILGA is an advocacy group promoting homosexual rights. They were notoriously denied UN accreditation for years because of their connection to groups that promote pedophilia.

C-Fam Friday Fax: A confidential audit of UNICEF and UNFPA found “gross” failures in transparency and surprisingly billions of dollars of unspent cash. Both agencies refused to disclose information on staff costs and travel. The auditor found that donors have “little knowledge regarding the ultimate destiny” of funds.

Bonian Golmohammadi at the : Huffington Post: On December 15-16, governments, international agencies and civil society groups met to discuss hundreds of recommendations on sustainable development in preparation for the June 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development. Focuses ranged from creating green jobs, to improving food security, achieving universal energy access, bettering water resource management, and addressing shark finning and marine pollution.

The Atlantic: In mid-December, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) released a little noticed report (PDF) discussing the issue of discrimination and violence based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Stefano Gennarini at C-Fami Friday Fax: A new UN report provides a window into the aspirations of LGBT rights advocates and sympathizers within the UN human rights machinery, aspirations that go well beyond mere tolerance.

George Neumayr at The American Spectator : Hillary Clinton was once seen as a radical busybody, clamoring for this or that absurd invented right, such as the right of children to sue their parents. Now she is seen as a safe establishment figure. But the truth is that she hasn’t changed. She is still a radical scold. Back in the days of the Clinton presidency she pushed the world to embrace an international right to abortion. These days her ambition is to impose upon all the nations of the earth “LGBT” rights.

Religion Clause Blog reports.

We, being the representatives of the civil society and non-governmental organizations of the Russian Federation and Ukraine, taking part in the second hearing conducted in Saint-Petersburg on November 24th, 2011, addressing the influence of international political organizations on the condition and welfare of the family in our countries, have examined the current trends concerning family problems in the United Nations, and in particular some activities of the UN treaty monitoring bodies, including the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Summary: The present report is submitted to the Human Rights Council pursuant to its resolution 17/19, in which the Council requested the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to commission a study documenting discriminatory laws and practices and acts of violence against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity, and how international human rights law can be used to end violence and related human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

UN.org: The report, released today by the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, outlines “a pattern of human rights violations… that demands a response,” and says governments have too often overlooked violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Traditional Values Coalition: Traditional Values Coalition (TVC) president Andrea Lafferty was targeted and detained by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security personnel this Wednesday during the closing event capping the three day closed-door conference advancing the implementation of U.N. Resolution 16/18.

Religion Clause: As previously reported, in March the United Nations Human Rights Council, in a major policy shift encouraged by Western nations, unanimously adopted Resolution 16/18 on Freedom of Religion or Belief which omits any reference to the concept of “defamation of religion” and instead focuses on the individual’s right to freedom of belief

News from The Associated Press: The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights says governments should also outlaw all forms of abuse based on sexual orientation.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: An article in the New American reveals that some UN agencies will not account for a large amount of their funding.

ADF Chief Counsel Benjamin Bull at Townhall : On Dec. 6, the White House released a memorandum instructing the heads of U.S. executive departments and agencies abroad to join in the “struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons” around the world . . . Yet while he’s doing his best to appeal to that group, Christians around the world continue to be persecuted—to be hunted like animals, then tortured and killed when captured—yet we are still awaiting a serious White House memorandum on their behalf.

News from The Associated Press: The last of five judges has been elected to the International Court of Justice, more than a month after the Security Council and the General Assembly failed to agree on a nominee.

ADF Attorney Kevin Theriot at Speak Up Movement Church Blog: So if Secretary of State Clinton is willing to acknowledge that rights aren’t simply something we’ve made up ourselves as we bump along evolutionary path to self actualization, why didn’t she say they emanate from God? The simple answer is she probably knows God not only gave us rights, He’s given responsibilities. The whole point of her speech is she believes the freedom to engage in homosexual behavior is a basic human right that even trumps religious freedom.