First, via UN Watch’s email briefings, here is a report which is more surreal than surprising:
GENEVA, March 13 – At the UN Human Rights Council on Friday, Syria accused Israel of violating human rights of children in the Golan, while diplomats met in another chamber on the same day to discuss a Syrian-drafted resolution, to be adopted next week, entitled “Human Rights in the Occupied Syrian Golan.” There will be five other resolutions targeting Israel, and about the same number on the rest of the world combined.
While this year Syria did not officially present the text, its delegate sat on the dais next to his Pakistani colleague who chaired the session on behalf of the Islamic group. Not a single diplomat called out the sheer lunacy of the exercise. Rather, the EU commented that it was “committed to the protection of all, including those in the occupied Golan.” It was willing to “constructively engage on the text,” even as it noted that its proposals last year were not implemented. Egypt said it aligned itself with the Islamic group.
Outrageously, Syria was recently re-confirmed as Rapporteur on the UN’s decolonisation committee. (The egregious Richard Falk is still of course Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories.)
Secondly – and the UN can’t be held responsible this time – here’s some news about the Muslim Brotherhood’s responses to a declaration condemning violence against women:
In its statement, the Brotherhood said that wives should not have the right to file legal complaints against their husbands for rape, and husbands should not be subject to the punishments meted out for the rape of a stranger.
A husband must have “guardianship” over his wife, not an equal “partnership” with her, the group declared. Daughters should not have the same inheritance rights as sons. Nor should the law cancel “the need for a husband’s consent in matters like travel, work or use of contraception” — a reform in traditional Islamic family law that was enacted under former President Hosni Mubarak and credited to his wife, Suzanne.
…
Closing its statement on the proposed United Nations declaration, the Brotherhood appeared to go even further. The provisions discussed are “destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution,” the statement concluded, and “would drag society back to pre-Islamic ignorance.”
Despite the implication that the MB would support strong measures against ‘real’ rapists, it has of course been claimed that they have deployed sexual violence as a political tool to silence and subdue their opponents.
