UN Watch has stated:
The UN Human Rights Council met today in Geneva and elected Mauritania as its Vice-President and Rapporteur for the next year, the second highest position at the world’s top human rights body.
“It is obscene for the U.N. to use the occasion of Human Rights Day, when we commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to elect the world’s worst enabler of slavery to this prestigious post,” said Hillel Neuer, UN Watch executive director.
“The U.N. is making an arsonist head of the fire department. It defies both morality and common sense.”
According to a recent report by the Guardian, “up to 800,000 people in a nation of 3.5 million remain chattels,” with power and wealth overwhelmingly concentrated among lighter-skinned Moors, “leaving slave-descended darker-skinned Moors and black Africans on the edges of society.”
UN Watch links to a Guardian report. This report from August was an example of excellent reporting from the Guardian’s international news desk, totally undermined the following month by the same paper’s Comment Is Free section, wherein the director of the Mauritanian British Business Council argued that:
Contrary to the allegations raised in Monica Mark’s feature, there is no slavery in Mauritania (Slavery still shackles Mauritania, 31 years after its abolition, 15 August). The article repeated the old narrative, promoted by certain Western NGOs, of “black Africans” enslaved by “Arabs”: “Activists and former slaves spoke of a centuries-old practice, a relic of the trans-Sahara slave trade when Arabic-speaking Moors raided African villages, flourishing in remote outposts of this vast desert country.”
Complaining to the Guardian is pointless – it trusts the wide-eyed ideologues and the bias of corrupt interest groups, more than it does its own reporters. (The lines between the two seem rather more blurry, when it comes to reporting on Israel).
Showing such contempt for its own staff, why would the Guardian care what you have to say to it?
Regarding the matter at hand – you should watch this award-winning documentary by CNN on slavery in Mauritania, when you can spare 23 minutes:
What a disgrace that Mauritania should have any place on the UN Human Rights Council!
