Truly Equal

To say the least. According to the latest UNICEF report, The State of the World’s Children 2007: Women and Children - The double dividend of gender equality, “poverty, violence and discrimination assault women worldwide and undermine their children’s futures.”

“Where you see extreme discrimination against women, you see more problems for children,” UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said in an interview.

“When you empower women,” Veneman said, “you benefit children.”

This is no surprise. According to the World Development Report of 1993, by the World Bank, maternal education has a greater impact on the reduction of child mortality than parental education.

Is it too much to f@%$#ng ask?

Human Rights Day , which was December 10, is an appropriate time to review a serious human rights crisis here in the United States: The fate of people from the Gulf Coast—particularly from New Orleans—displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

Our nation’s greatest natural disaster—and the man-made crisis that followed—were on an unprecedented scale. More than a million people were uprooted from their communities after the storm, and over 300,000 from New Orleans alone are still displaced over one year after the levees broke.

[…]This idea is supported by the U.N.’s Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the internationally approved framework to protect human rights before, during and after being displaced by a humanitarian disaster.

Be sure to read the rest, it is a superb read.

May you roast in hell, Augusto Pinochet. And say hi to all of history’s war criminals for me while you are there.

And may you receive a proper sentence, the one you never received on Earth:

Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew Chile’s democratically elected Marxist president in a bloody coup and ruled the nation for 17 years, died today. He was 91. Pinochet had suffered a heart attack a week ago. Chile’s government says at least 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during his rule, but Pinochet escaped hundreds of criminal complaints because of his declining physical and mental health.

Oh, poor him. I surely hope the people of the U.S. learn and don’t let George W. Bush of the hook as well.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 58 years old today, which is International Human Rights Day.

Never in the history of mankind have men - or women and children for that matter - have had any rights, written on paper and backed up by the power of government, so I can see why some folks in the U.S. still have the primitive, caveman, Bush-like mentality that upholding established, international human rights agreements like the Geneva Conventions or the Convention on the Rights of the Child is somehow against the interest of the United States. For example, here is one of the stated reasons of why the Bush administration - along with the usual conservative idiots in the U.S. Senate - won’t ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child:

“The Convention on the Rights of the Child may be a positive tool for promoting child welfare for those countries that have adopted it. But we believe the text goes too far when it asserts entitlements based on economic, social and cultural rights. … The human rights-based approach … poses significant problems as used in this text.”

Very enlightening, ain’t it?

Posted below is a great article called Bringing Human Rights Home, from TomPaine.com.

Read the rest of this entry »