Leaders of a UN's Human Rights Commission: Cuba, Zimbabwe, Saudi America

[Rudey]

Combined with electing Sudan to such a high role in the past, this is interesting...

U.S. Blasts Human Rights Panel Selection
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 2:19 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department denounced on Tuesday the selection of Cuba and Zimbabwe for a panel that will decide on the agenda for a meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission next month.

``The United States believes that countries that routinely and systematically violate the rights of their citizens should not be selected to review the human rights performance of other countries,'' State Department press office Tom Casey said.

Besides Cuba and Zimbabwe, the other members of the so-called ``Working Group on Situations'' are Hungary, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.

``Despite the inappropriate membership of Cuba and Zimbabwe, we look for the working group to conduct its procedures in a balanced and transparent manner,'' Casey said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice listed Cuba and Zimbabwe among six ``outposts of tyranny'' during her Senate confirmation hearing last month.

Casey's statement offered no criticism of the selection of Saudi Arabia, an authoritarian monarchy. Officials note, however, that a reform movement is under way in the country, highlighted by village elections set for this week.

The working group passes judgment on the admissibility of complaints intended for consideration by the 53-member commission. The group meets every March at its headquarters in Geneva.

Cuba was selected to the working group based on the support it received from fellow Latin American countries. The Cuban Foreign Ministry web site said Argentina proposed Cuba for membership on the panel.

The show of hemispheric support for Cuba signaled another setback for the administration in its campaign to isolate Cuba internationally.

Last week, ignoring Bush administration objections, the European Union lifted a suspension on high-level contacts with Cuba that was imposed after a crackdown on dissidents in 2003.

Cuba's official news agency, AIN, said that among the cases being considered by the commission this year are ``the well documented atrocities committed by the U.S. government in Iraq, particularly the brutal procedures used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib jail and at the prison camp set up at the illegal U.S. naval base located in the eastern Cuban province of Guantanamo.''

Jose Miguel Vivanco, head of the America's Division of Human Rights Watch, reacted sharply to Cuba's selection to the panel.

``I think it's a scandal,'' Vivanco said. A country with ``such a poor record on human rights'' should not be rewarded in this way,'' he said.

-Rudey