United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- 6oth Anniversary -- December 10 -- 1948-2008

VHeadline commentarist Kenneth T. Tellis writes: As we celebrate this important event, our minds should go back and think of its many drawbacks in our present day world.

• In South Africa, Apartheid and those who sponsored it, are defeated and lose power. But elsewhere else, it failed miserably because those who signed in good faith, failed to keep their promises.

We have seen how it had no effect on the Human Rights violations in Rwanda. In Iraq and Afghanistan the U.S. saw fit to violate it, because it would not affect effect their trade, so they had their own agenda. But worse still the U.S. went about using renditions (kidnappings) of foreign citizens and torturing them at will. The U.S. also sought to starve Cuba, because it would not kowtow to it. The policy was to starve them into submission. Cuba of course weathered the storm by using methods that were unique. The U.S. attempt to use sanctions which deny necessities to certain countries is a form of Human Rights violations. Of the U.S. has been using this as a means to force their way into Latin American states like Ecuador, Venezuela and a few other countries in the Caribbean.

Such violations were also carried out against Iraq, where thousands of children died because they were denied medical aid and food, all in violation of the U.N. Human Rights Charter. But worse still they even used depleted uranium shells that brought the death of Iraqi children by radiation.

In Serbia U.S. President Bill Clinton even ordered the bombing of passenger trains, buses, apartment buildings, churches and the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in violation of the Vienna Convention. At no point did the U.S. fear that there could be some retaliation and continued its massacres of civilians in Serbia without let up. All this bombing of the Serbian civilians was carried out by NATO warplanes and there was no outcry by neutral countries, because the U.S. would not hesitate to bomb them if need be. Thus out of fear people in Europe were silenced by the U.S. and its allies.

Now we come to Canada a U.S. ally and partner in NAFTA, where the U.N. Universal Declaration has been violated since the 1970s, and U.S. governments have been aware that this is going on.

The whole world used South Africa as a whipping post, when it came to Human Rights violations, but conveniently hid their own crimes against Human Rights. Canada, for one, knew and encouraged the province of Quebec in its violations of Human Rights since 1974, but demanded that the United Nations pass sanctions against South Africa.

The province of Quebec simply treated the U.D.H.R. as a joke, because the federal governments of Canada permitted Human Rights violations to continue unabated. It was this reason why 800,000 people left the province since 1974 to date. Religious, linguistic, racial and cultural discrimination goes on, and even the murder of those belonging to ethnic communities like the murder of an 18-year Honduran boy named Freddy Villanueva is proof positive that the present government of premier Jean Charest is permitting crimes in Quebec far worse than South African apartheid to continue.

• One has only to visit Montreal-North or some other ethnic neighborhood in Quebec to discover how RACIAL BIAS has replaced the RULE of LAW in the Metis NATION of QUEBEC.

How does Quebec get away with it? By not permitting foreign press/journalists anywhere near the scene of a crime committed by the quebecois against members of the minority community. Making Quebecoise Louise Arbour, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, set back the whole Human Rights program countless years ... during her tenure no action was permitted against Quebec's Human Rights violations ... and any complaints were simply put into the shredder.

Kenneth T. Tellis
kenttellis@rogers.com

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Venezuela is facing the most difficult period of its history with honest reporters crippled by sectarianism on top of rampant corruption within the administration and beyond, aided and abetted by criminal forces in the US and Spanish governments which cannot accept the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people to decide over their own future.

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