Tag: un

Top UN “Court” to Issue Landmark Ruling on “Climate Change”

At the request of the United Nations and its member governments, the top UN “court” is set to rule on the supposed legal “obligations” of governments when it comes to fighting CO2 emissions and the alleged man-made “climate change” they supposedly cause. Experts say it may be the most significant case ever heard by the global body.

The Biden administration joined governments around the world asking the court to take a strong stand on the issue. But critics are sounding the alarm. Agriculture, energy, transportation, and other industries are all in the crosshairs, fueling concerns over more government-mandated economic carnage ahead.  

“Largest Ever Case”

While the ruling expected from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) later this year is officially considered “advisory,” it will have profound economic and political implications for the entire world. The UN is calling this the “largest ever case before the UN world court.” Media propagandists, meanwhile, framed it as putting “the entire industrialized world on trial.”

UN leaders expect governments around the world as well as international organizations to craft their “climate” policies based on the findings of the controversial judicial body. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a proud socialist, was one of many key figures touting the significance of the case in the evolution of the global “climate regime,” as they call it.  

Encouraging the UN General Assembly in 2023 to ask the ICJ to rule on the issue, Guterres said the body’s decisions “have tremendous importance and can have a long-standing impact on the international legal order.”

The ruling, expected later this year, he continued, will “assist the General Assembly, the United Nations and Member States to take the bolder and stronger climate action that our world so desperately needs.”

“It could also guide the actions and conduct of States in their relations with each other, as well as towards their own citizens,” added Guterres. “This is essential.”

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UN accuses Israel of turning Gaza hospitals into ‘death traps’

The UN Human Rights Office issued a report on 31 December condemning Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals, saying they had become “death traps.”

The 23-page report documented various Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and the destruction of the strip’s health care system between October 2023 and July 2024.

“The destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and the extent of killing of patients, staff, and other civilians in these attacks, is a direct consequence of the disregard of international humanitarian and human rights law,” the report said.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said the Israeli military had shown “blatant disregard for international humanitarian and human rights law.”

“As if the relentless bombing and the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza were not enough, the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap,” Turk said in a statement.

In recent days, the Israeli military escalated its attack on the Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza while detaining the hospital director, Hussam Abu Safia, and hundreds of others.

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UN Expert Urges Medical World to Cut Ties With Israel Amid Attacks on Gaza Hospitals

As Israeli forces stand accused of war crimes during attacks on multiple Gaza hospitals in recent days, Francesca Albanese – the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories – on Monday implored the global medical community to respond by cutting ties with Israel.

“I urge medical professionals worldwide to pursue the severance of all ties with Israel as a concrete way to forcefully denounce Israel’s full destruction of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza, a critical tool of its ongoing genocide,” Albanese wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

Albanese amplified a post by Dr. Rupa Marya – one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian human rights in the U.S. medical community – calling on Israeli forces to release Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia.

Abu Safiya, who documented Israel’s siege and attack on Kamal Adwan and who reported last week that nearly 50 people including five hospital staff members were killed by an Israel Defense Forces airstrike on a nearby apartment tower, was among dozens of other medical staffers abducted by IDF troops on Saturday.

After besieging and attacking the hospital for weeks, Israeli forces raided the facility and rounded up 240 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel claimed without evidence that Kamal Adwan was being used as a Hamas command center. With the facility shut down and badly damaged, critical patients and their caregivers were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital.

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UN General Assembly Adopts Controversial Cybercrime Treaty Amid Criticism Over Censorship and Surveillance Risks

As we expected, even though opponents have been warning that the United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime needed to have a narrower scope, strong human rights safeguard and be more clearly defined in order to avoid abuse – the UN General Assembly has just adopted the documents, after five years of wrangling between various stakeholders.

It is now up to UN-member states to first sign, and then ratify the treaty that will come into force three months after the 40th country does that.

The UN bureaucracy is pleased with the development, hailing the convention as a “landmark” and “historic” global treaty that will improve cross-border cooperation against cybercrime and digital threats.

But critics have been saying that speech and human rights might fall victim to the treaty since various UN members treat human rights and privacy in vastly different ways – while the treaty now in a way “standardizes” law enforcement agencies’ investigative powers across borders.

Considerable emphasis has been put by some on how “authoritarian” countries might abuse this new tool meant to tackle online crime – but in reality, this concern applies to any country that ends up ratifying the treaty.

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WHO Expands “Misinformation Management” Efforts with “Social Listening”

The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) is not the only entity engaging globally (the Gates Foundation comes to mind as another) that likes to turn to developing, or small and often functionally dependent states to “test” or “check” some of the key elements of its policies.

The pandemic put the WHO center-stage, and in many ways influenced the UN’s clear change of trajectory from its true purpose to assisting governments globally in policing speech and surveilling their populations.

The WHO is comfortable in conflating health-focused issues (its actual mandate), with what it presents as threats linked to “disinformation” and “AI.”

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UN General Assembly to Adopt Controversial Cybercrime Treaty, Ignoring Privacy and Free Speech Concerns

The United Nations General Assembly will this week adopt the UN Cybercrime Treaty, with the US expected to be among the countries that support the controversial document.

Opponents will then have to hope that various UN member-states would eventually opt not to sign and ratify the treaty, which has variously been described as “flawed” and all the way to being “a threat to free speech and privacy” and a tool for “transnational oppression.”

Among those opponents are human rights and media organizations, as well as tech companies, while doubts have been expressed even by the UN High Commissioner for human rights, among others.

Yet governments and law enforcement agencies are among the Cybercrime Treaty’s supporters since it opens up the possibility of more effective cross-border cooperation and evidence (including personal data) gathering and sharing.

But, the final text that is about to be adopted, in many parts falls short of what are considered international human rights standards, allowing UN members who sign the document to then choose whether to build a number of these standards into their own implementation.

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Many Preppers and 2nd Amendment Proponents Believe That the Arms Trade Treaty Will First Lead to Registration of All Firearms

The UN’s Arms Trade Treaty which covers everything from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships – came into force on 24 December 2014. This treaty has not been ratified by our Congress but had the support of our Secretary of State, John Kerry who signed it and Our president at that time, who without expressly mentioning the treaty, said in a speech at the UN that all nations “must meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms.” The problem with that statement and this treaty is that we the people aren’t in control of what those ‘international norms’ are and as we have seen time and time again, those international norms might be detrimental to our country.

Many preppers and 2nd Amendment proponents believe that the Arms Trade Treaty will first lead to registration of all firearms and when that happens, historically the next step is confiscation through some means. Technically, no treaty can be put into action in the United States unless it has been ratified by a 2/3 majority of the senate. This fact is what most people cite when they are trying to refute any legitimate concerns about the UN Arms Trade Treaty or any other treaty’s potential effect on our country. This sounds well and good and serves to placate some, but for this fail-safe to have any weight you would first need to have a government that followed the letter of the constitution and additionally, that government would need to follow the wishes of the citizens they are representing.

Our government has proven time and time again that following the constitution is simply not something they feel they have to do when it stands in their way. For example, the senate has never voted on the Kyoto Protocol but that hasn’t stopped the EPA from enacting rules complying with the main goals of that treaty. Coal plants are being shut down left and right while the US and China agreed in 2014 to let China keep growing their output of carbon emissions (with coal power plants) until 2030. There are many examples of policies that are enacted that fall well outside the bounds of Constitutional limits on power but that doesn’t stop our representatives does it? On any issue there is more brainpower spent on finding ways around the Constitution than actually following it with the seeming goal of every single facet of law being finally decided by the Supreme Court. It’s as if in our society, the rules we decided long ago to set for ourselves are only as good as the interpretations of people today and if every single thing can be challenged (and in some cases changed), we don’t really have a Constitution at all. What we have is a framework for legal arguments that only establishes a baseline which can be over ruled completely by a simple majority of ideology on the bench.

As for a government that listens to their constituents, that long gone relic of thought is promised by every single person running for office. “I feel your pain” The truth of the matter is that in this day and age, every politician is a benefactor of the same special interests. There are no democrat and republican sides whenever both are receiving money from the same companies. The elected politicians, by overwhelming majority do not care what you say or want because they don’t answer to you. Their actions directly contradict election results, polls and public outcry. The 2014 mid-term elections  held should have sent a very strong signal to the leadership of both parties that the country wasn’t on-board with the policies of the current administration and the direction of affairs with the Congress, however; Obamacare and Amnesty both remain intact without so much as a whimper from our newly elected majority who promised for years to repeal it as soon as they were ‘in power’. To add insult to injury, the Republicans just released a 1 trillion budget proposal just over 24 hours before a procedural vote on it knowing that nobody would have time to read it. Same tricks but a different face is behind the podium. Why should we expect anything different from what we have been seeing?

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War On Drugs Has ‘Completely And Utterly’ Failed, United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Says

The United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights is calling on the international community to move away from punitive, criminal drug policies, saying that the global war on drugs “has failed, completely and utterly.”

“Criminalisation and prohibition have failed to reduce drug use and failed to deter drug-related crime,” Commissioner Volker Türk said on Thursday at a conference in Warsaw that included leaders and experts from across Europe. “These policies are simply not working—and we are failing some of the most vulnerable groups in our societies.”

Türk urged a shift to a more evidence-based, human rights-centered approach to drug policies “prioritising people over punishment.”

“We need to start treating the person, not punishing the drug use disorder,” he said, according to a UN press release. “Historically, people who use drugs are marginalised, criminalised, discriminated against and left behind—very often stripped of their dignity and their rights.”

Rather than ostracize or punish drug users, Türk said their perspectives should be included in discussions about how to craft policies that minimize harm. “We are destined to fail unless we ensure their genuine participation in formulating and implementing drug policy,” he said.

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Henry Lamb: The UN’s 1995 ‘Global Neighbourhood’ plan for a One World Government

Henry Lamb was a renowned expert on global governance and its implications on individual freedom and private property rights. He was the author of ‘The Rise of Global Governance’. He was also the author of the article ‘The UN and Property Rights’, the report ‘Global Governance: Why? How? When?’ and a columnist for Renew America.  And chairman of Sovereignty International, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting individual sovereignty and limited government, founder of the Environmental Conservation Organisation and Freedom21, Inc.

In 1996, Lamb gave a t talk on the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Wildlands Project at the Granada Forum.

“All of the conspiracy theories that you’ve ever heard about ‘One World Government’, about the UN takeover of the world, all of those conspiracies have now been laid to rest,” he said.  “There’s nothing conspiratorial about it.  It’s all published!”

“The UN-funded Commission on Global Governance began meeting in 1992, in earnest … and last fall released their final report.  It is entitled ‘Our Global Neighbourhood’,” he said.

After briefly describing the 1995 document, he goes on to talk about Agenda 21, the Biodiversity Treaty, The Wildlands Project and the Global Biodiversity Assessment.

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UNESCO’s New Mission: Train Influencers About Combatting Online “Misinformation”

The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is now incorporating teaching influencers how to “fact check” into its activities.

UNESCO claims that influencers have become “primary sources of news and cultural information” around the world – which prompted it to carry out a survey into how these online personalities verify the “news” they present.

Citizens in UN member-countries may or may not be happy that this is how their taxpayer money funding the world organization is being spent these days. But UNESCO is not only conducting surveys; it is also developing a training course for said influencers (which are also interchangeably referred to as content creators in press releases).

It’s meant to teach them not only to “report misinformation, disinformation and hate speech” but also to collaborate with legacy media and these outlets’ journalists, in order to “amplify fact-based information.”

The survey, “Behind the screens,” was done together with researchers from the US Bowling Green State University. 500 influencers from 45 countries took part, and the key findings, UNESCO said, are that 63 percent of them “lack rigorous and systematic fact-checking protocols” – but also, that 73% said they “want to be trained.”

This UN agency also frames the results as showing that respondents are “struggling” with disinformation and hate speech and are “calling for more training.”

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