Wednesday 14 November 2012

UN Slam US Embargo on Cuba Again


Out of the 193 members of the UN Assembly, 188 have today voted to abolish the 52-year trade embargo with Cuba with only Israel and the Pacific nation of Palau voting against and The Marshall Islands and Micronesia abstaining.
This is the 21st year running that the UN has decried the American economic sanctions against the island nation but America justifies continuing the embargo by saying it is waiting for signs of changes in Cuba’s political regime and improvements in the island state’s human rights record.
The US envoy at the UN assembly, Ronald D. Godard, argued the embargo is 'one of the tools in our overall efforts to encourage respect for the human rights and basic freedoms to which the United Nations itself is committed'. Ironic that he chose to talk about the human rights and basic freedoms of a country where the US built a massive detention centre where people have been held without charge for the past ten years.    
The representative of Egypt said that while peoples in his region were fighting for freedom, justice and a genuine democracy, it was troubling that the United States continued to adopt coercive measures to prevent a neighbouring nation from freely deciding its own political and economic system while the Russians condemned it as an 'outdated relic of the Cold War era which had resulted in the worsening of the living conditions of the Cuban people and the Chinese said it violated their fundamental human rights including the rights to food, health and education as well as their right to development.
Even the North Koreans described the embargo as 'a serious violation of the principle of non-interference in sovereign States' and when you have the North Koreans sitting on the higher moral ground than you and your policy is backed only by the most unpopular country on the planet in Israel and an island nation nobody could point to on a map, maybe someone somewhere in the White House should realise that maybe they are doing something wrong here.

7 comments:

david g said...

Expecting maturity from the U.S. is entirely misplaced, Lucy.



"I knew who we were, what we did, what we actually stood for and the terrifying and willful innocence that permits most Americans to think of themselves as good and virtuous when they are, in reality, members of an efficient race of killers and ruthless profiteers.”


Chris Hedges. An American and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Anonymous said...

uh lucy, those people at the "masive" facility were caught in combat, out of uniform, which nullifies any and all geneva rights...

q

Anonymous said...

yeah and what seperates us from the rest of the world is our efficieny...

q

Lucy said...

In uniform and in combat all apart from all the ones snatched off the street q.

Anonymous said...

terrorists don't follow convention - thus they give up conventional rights.

end of story.

q

david g said...

"yeah and what seperates (whatever that means) us from the rest of the world is our efficieny (whatever that is) and our love of killing..."

And we can't spell either!

Cheezy said...

Let he who is without typos cast the first snide and entirely pointless comment.