Tag: un

Women’s Rights Groups Protest UN Appointment Of Transgender Activist As “Women’s Champion”

The United Nations has appointed a transgender activist as a “women’s champion,” prompting women’s rights groups to express their “dismay and disappointment.”

The Times reports “Seventeen women’s rights groups have signed a letter to the charity UN Women UK expressing concern about its choice of a transgender woman as its “UK champion”.

UN Women bills itself as the “Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women,” that works “for gender equality and the empowerment of women.”

Yet they’ve appointed a biological man as the UK’s representative for women.

It seems like a direct exercise in trolling women at this point.

The person in question is Munroe Bergdorf, a model, broadcaster and transgender activist.

Campaign Group Fair Play For Women issued a statement noting “In December the UN Women’s UK committee appointed a male who presents in a highly sexualised stereotype of womanhood as an ambassador for women.”

It continues, “UN Women has made a point of demonstrating that it considers males can become women. It’s disappointing to see the UK committee go so far as to select a male to represent women. Their credibility is in tatters.”

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What US Got Most Crucially Wrong in UN Veto

The United States has once again voted for genocide before all the world. 

There is no government in the world that has more power to put an end to likely the worst crime of the century than the United States. 

And yet on Friday at the U.N. Security Council Washington vetoed a resolution that would have demanded an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israel’s unmitigated slaughter. The U.S. blocked the measure because it unequivocally wants the killing to continue. 

It can talk all it wants about its rejection of the resolution because it did not condemn Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7.  But the crux of the U.S. justification for a vote that has brought it worldwide condemnation is a willfully ignorant statement about the cause of this war. 

In the U.S. explanation of its veto, the U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood said: 

“Perhaps most unrealistically, this resolution retains a call for an unconditional ceasefire. I explained in my remarks this morning why this is not only unrealistic but dangerous: it would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7. …

As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, any ceasefire is at best temporary and is certainly not peace. And any ceasefire that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves.”

This formulation reveals the U.S. government’s twisted thinking. The occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza are not the causes of this and previous wars, but instead Hamas’ “ideology of destruction.” Which stems from what? Just some evil DNA?

Thus for the U.S. the solution is not ending the occupation but maintaining the slaughter supposedly to destroy Hamas, even though Israel has killed relatively few of its fighters and none of its top commanders and is instead waging a war of annihilation against the Gazan people.  

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Another Shameful US Veto at the United Nations

Yesterday was another shameful day for the Biden administration and the United States:

The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution Friday backed by almost all other Security Council members and dozens of other nations demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. Supporters called it a terrible day and warned of more civilian deaths and destruction as the war goes into its third month.

The excuses that Robert Wood, the U.S. deputy ambassador, gave for opposing the resolution added insult to injury. He said that a ceasefire would “only plant the seeds for the next war,” as if the continuation and intensification of the current war weren’t already doing that to a much greater extent. The resolution called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the unconditional and immediate release of all hostages, but the U.S. representative had the gall to call it “unbalanced.”

The U.S. objected that the process had been “rushed,” but speed is obviously crucial when there is a major humanitarian crisis that requires urgent attention. If the U.S. hadn’t shot down other Security Council resolutions on this conflict over the last two months, the situation would not be quite as far gone as it is. Wood claimed that the resolution was “divorced from reality,” but nothing could be more divorced from reality than an administration that is actively stoking the conflict while pretending that a ceasefire is bad for the cause of peace.

The resolution that the U.S. vetoed had the support of almost 100 other member states, including several major treaty allies. Vetoing this measure doesn’t just leave the U.S. isolated on the world stage, but it also confirms in the eyes of the world that our government is a rogue great power that cannot be trusted. In addition to being profoundly wrong in itself, this veto will do significant damage to our country’s reputation in the eyes of almost all other nations in the world. Agnes Callamard of Amnesty International summed it up well:

US veto of ceasefire resolution displays callous disregard for civilian suffering in face of staggering death toll. It is morally indefensible, a dereliction of the US duty to prevent atrocity crimes and a complete lack of global leadership. Just appalling.

While the U.S. continues to shield Israel from international pressure, it is also rushing more weapons to Israel without Congressional review. This is the first time that an administration has used the emergency provision in the Arms Control Act since the Trump administration did this in 2019 to rush weapons to the Saudi coalition for use in Yemen. The Trump administration’s move was widely criticized as a cynical attempt to escape scrutiny of the U.S. role in fueling that war, and the Biden administration is doing the same thing today. The president has been eager to skirt Congressional oversight in this conflict. Arms transfers to Israel over the last two months have been carried out with virtually no transparency, and Biden has lifted all restrictions on the kinds of weapons that Israel could receive from the U.S.

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The UN Is Threatening Privacy Under Pretense of New Cybercrime Treaty

The US digital rights group EFF is describing the latest UN Cybercrime Treaty draft as “a significant step backward” and a case of “perilously broadening its scope beyond the cybercrimes specifically defined in the convention, encompassing a long list of non-cybercrimes.”

This “dance” – with some reported progress, for things to then again get worse – is not exactly new in the now lengthy process of negotiating the document, amid criticism not only from observers among the involved rights non-profits, but also UN member-countries.

EFF is also convinced that these latest developments are not accidental, i.e., a case of oversight, but rather an essentially purposeful wrong step that diminishes chances of the treaty, once/if adopted being the result of proper consensus.

When it all started, the Treaty was presented as a “standardized” manner for the world to combat cybercrime.

What has been happening in the meanwhile, though, is a seemingly never-ending stream of additions and expansions of the document’s original powers, to the point where it has now, in the words of EFF, “morphed into an expansive surveillance treaty.”

A major concern is what EFF calls possible overreach as national and international investigations are carried out. And instead of improving on these concerns, the new draft is said to have held on to past controversial rules, only to add even more.

This time, it’s in the form of “allowing states to compel engineers or employees to undermine security measures, posing a threat to encryption.”

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Inside The UN Plan To Control Speech Online

A powerful United Nations agency has unveiled a plan to regulate social media and online communication while cracking down on what it describes as “false information” and “conspiracy theories,” sparking alarm among free-speech advocates and top U.S. lawmakers.

In its 59-page report released this month, the U.N. Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) outlined a series of “concrete measures which must be implemented by all stakeholders: governments, regulatory authorities, civil society, and the platforms themselves.”

This approach includes the imposition of global policies, through institutions such as governments and businesses, designed to stop the spread of various forms of speech while promoting objectives such as “cultural diversity” and “gender equality.”

In particular, the U.N. agency aims to create an “Internet of Trust” by targeting what it calls “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and “conspiracy theories.”

Examples of expression flagged to be stopped or restricted include concerns about elections, public health measures, and advocacy that could constitute “incitement to discrimination.”

Critics are warning that allegations of “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” have increasingly been used by powerful forces in government and Big Tech to silence true information and even core political speech.

Just this month, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released a report blasting the “pseudoscience of disinformation.”

Among other concerns, the committee found this “pseudoscience” has been “weaponized” by what lawmakers refer to as the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

The goal: silence constitutionally protected political speech, mostly by conservatives.

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UN & Bill Gates Launch “50in5” Global Digital Infrastructure Plans

Last week the United Nations Development Program officially launched their new initiative promoting “Digital Public Infrastructure” (DPI) around the world.

The “50in5” program – so-called because it aims to introduce DPI in fifty countries in the next five years – began with a live-streamed event on November 8th.

For those of you unsure what “Digital Public Infrastructure” is, the 50in5 website is quite clear:

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) – which refers to a secure and interoperable network of components that include digital payments, ID, and data exchange systems.

There’s nothing new there, for anyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention. Digital identity and digital payment systems are self-explanatory (and we’ve covered them before). “Data Exchange Systems” essentially means national governments will share identity and financial records of citizens across borders with other nations, or indeed with global government agencies.

The key word is “interoperable”.

As we have written before, the “global government” won’t be one single health care system, identity database, or digital currency – but dozens of notionally separate systems all carefully designed to be fully “interoperable”.

As well as being a project of the UNDP, UNICEF, and the Inter-American Development Bank, the 50in5 is funded by various globalist NGOs and non-profits including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and (indirectly through an NGO called “Co-Develop”) the Rockefeller Foundation.

The eleven counties taking part in the program so far are Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Moldova, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Togo. A careful spread from every continent, including first, second, and third-world nations.

It is a list noteworthy for including NATO, EU, and BRICS members. Interesting implications on supposed “multipolarity” there.

In related news, on the exact same day the 50in5 program launched, the European Parliament and Council of Europe agreed on a new framework for a region-wide European Digital Identity (eID) system.

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UN Agency Unveils Action Plan To Regulate Speech on Social Media Platforms

Yet another United Nations agency – this time the Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) – has joined the contentious efforts to use UN resources in the “war on misinformation.”

UNESCO is not lagging behind some of the veterans of this “war” regarding the kind of alarmist language its leadership is choosing to use to justify the policy.

Thus, Director-General Audrey Azoulay presented an action plan, saying that online disinformation is “a major threat to stability and social cohesion.”

A press release announcing the plan referred to the phenomenon of misinformation as “a scourge” and one that is intensifying. Those behind all this must hope that this is enough to explain what UNESCO – formerly known mostly for protection of world heritage sites and raising funds for underprivileged children – is even doing “fighting disinformation.”

But here’s the plan: to somehow not harm freedom of speech, and yet push for social media companies to hire more “moderators” that speak all the major languages and whose job would be “effective control of content.”

A lot of attention seems to be given to strengthening censorship capacities in languages other than English; that could explain why, according to UNESCO’s statement, the plan has received support particularly from some countries in Latin America and Africa.

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UN agency: There aren’t enough body bags in Gaza

As the war between Israel and Hamas escalates, the U.N.’s special agency for Palestinian refugees warned Monday that under-siege Gaza is short of body bags.

“The number of killed is increasing. There are not enough body-bags for the dead in Gaza,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said in a press release.

Since Hamas launched its violent surprise attack in Israel nine days ago — killing more than 1,400 Israelis and triggering retaliatory air strikes from Israel and a siege of the Gaza Strip — 2,329 Palestinians have been killed, according to the report.

“Gaza has had no electricity, pushing vital services, including health, water and sanitation to the brink of collapse, and worsening food insecurity,” the agency added in the report.

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Total siege of Gaza ‘prohibited’ under international law: UN

Israel’s total siege of the Gaza Strip, depriving civilians of goods essential for survival, is banned under international law, the United Nations human rights chief said on Tuesday.

Volker Turk called for all sides instead to defuse the “explosive powder-keg situation”, as Israel warned of a sustained war to destroy the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

“We know from bitter experience that vengeance is not the answer, and ultimately innocent civilians pay the price,” Turk said.

Hamas, which abducted about 150 people in its surprise weekend assault on Israel, threatened to execute the hostages if Israeli air strikes continue “targeting” Gaza residents without warning.

The threat came after Israel on Monday imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip, cutting off food, water and electricity supplies.

“The imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of goods essential for their survival is prohibited under international humanitarian law,” Turk said in a statement.

The siege risks seriously compounding the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation in Gaza, the statement said.

Any restrictions on the movement of people and goods to implement a siege must be justified by military necessity or may otherwise amount to collective punishment, it added.

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UN says Colombia’s coca crop at all-time high as officials promote new drug policies

Coca cultivation reached an all-time high in Colombia last year, the U.N. said, as the administration of President Gustavo Petro struggles to reduce poverty in remote areas and contain armed groups that are profiting from the cocaine trade.

The new findings on coca growing were published over the weekend by the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, which said 230,000 hectares (nearly 570,000 acres) of farmland in Colombia were planted with coca in 2022, a 13% increase from the previous year.

The South American nation is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine, which is made from coca leaves. Colombia provides 90% of the cocaine sold in the United States each year.

Colombia’s government said Monday that the amount of land planted with coca is increasing at a slower pace than in previous years. It hopes new programs that provide greater economic incentives for farmers to adopt legal crops will help reduce cocaine production in coming years.

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