Human rights campaigners are condemning the election of seven countries with controversial rights records to the United Nations Human Rights Council by the General Assembly last week, and calling for reform of the election process. “The council elections have become a pre-cooked process that strips the meaning from the membership standards established by the General Assembly,” Human Rights Watch Global Advocacy Director Peggy Hicks said in a press release. A total of 14 countries got electoral nods from the General Assembly during the uncontested, closed-slate May 13 vote. Libya, Angola, Malaysia, Qatar, Uganda, Mauritania and Thailand drew fire from rights [...]
My first reaction on reading the draft resolution of the U.N. sanctions against Iran (.pdf) now being circulated was that the economic component seemed pretty ho-hum, certainly far from the crippling measures we’ve been hearing about for the past few months. On the other hand, the military component caught my eye, because it seemed to put the kabosh on any hope Iran might still have of taking delivery of the Russian-made S-300 air defense missile systems it had contracted for. Today the AFP is reporting that if the draft stands as written, that is in fact the case. That represents [...]
An incident earlier this month in which a Chinese survey vessel chased off a Japanese coast guard vessel in the East China Sea is putting further strain on longstanding territorial disputes between China and Japan, despite diplomatic efforts to resolve them. In an e-mail interview, Brookings Institution Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies Director Richard C. Bush III explains the current state of Japan-China maritime disputes.WPR: What are the current territorial disputes between Japan and China in the East China Sea? Richard Bush: Japan and China have one territorial dispute: That concerns islands north and east of Taiwan that China [...]
