What countries are the most hypocritical on human rights?

Courtesy of Kate at Wronging Rights, here is Wednesday’s UN Human Rights Council vote on investigating Israel for war crimes in Gaza: Gaza-vote And here is the vote four months ago to investigate Sri Lanka: SL-voteMost flip. From Kate:

This is interesting (or depressing, depending on how you look at it) because when countries explain their votes, they almost always speak in absolutes.

Note that this is a vote to investigate—to gather more information to see whether a violation has been made. Presumably this need not be a high bar. I for one would love to see a UNHRC hypocrisy index. A simple variance measure would be an easy start, though if the Council gets a large number of questionable proposals to vote on, some conditions could be set (e.g. count only those cases where concerns of possible human rights violations has been raised by one of the more independent watchdogs.) Major paper love to write stories about international rankings.

81 Responses

  1. I think this is a bit too easy. The proposals are not entirely comparable and we do know there are other factors influencing country’s votes (i.e. it may influence interventionism in their own region). But what I took issue with is Kate suggesting the European nations flipped their position. By abstaining they effectively voted yes without having to vote yes. I posit they didn’t flip their vote at all. Which makes this a story about the non-interventionism bloc moving their position because of… reasons.

  2. Israel has the vice-chair position on the UN 4th Committee – Decolonization which deals with , among other things, Palestinian refugees. Iran has the vice-chair position on the 6th UN Committee -Legal that deals with , among other things, international terrorism and the legal protection of diplomatic missions.

  3. On Sri Lanka, it also took the Tamil Diaspora and other organizations 5 years to build up enough support to get that resolution to pass.