Blame Canada: U.N. Rights Chief ‘Alarmed’ Over Canadian Law, but Silent on China, Iran & Saudi Arabia at View From Geneva
Canada will be put in the company of some of the world’s worst abusers of human rights tomorrow when the UN’s highest human rights official expresses “alarm” over Quebec’s new law on demonstrations during her opening address to a meeting of the 47-nation UN Human Rights Council, revealed the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch, which obtained an advance copy of her speech. Other states on the UN watchlist include Syria, Pakistan and Zimbabwe.
“Moves to restrict freedom of assembly continue to alarm me, as is the case in the province of Quebec in Canada in the context of students’ protests,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay will say tomorrow, according to her draft speech.
The rights czar reserves her sharpest language for Canada. While Pillay cites only two other countries in the world for restrictions on freedom of assembly—expressing “concern” about Russia, and “deep concern” for Eritrea—only Canada provokes her far stronger “alarm.”
Some human right experts questioned Pillay’s failure to mention the mass disruptions which escalated into bottle-throwing and other forms violence occasioned by several of the protests, questioning her decision to spotlight a country widely considered one of the world’s most free and democratic.
“While Canada is certainly fair game for criticism,” said Hillel Neuer, the Montreal-born lawyer who directs UN Watch, “for Pillay to divert the world’s attention to what in a global context is an absolutely marginal case—a law already under before the chief justice of the Quebec Superior Court, and less demanding than the Geneva laws regulating the human rights rallies we hold in front of her own building—is simply absurd.”