UN and Human Rights

Thalif Deen writes: U.N. Talks But Won't Act on Genocide on the Inter Press Service News Agency.

One of the problems for the UN is that by the time genocide is happening, only military action is effective, and that takes enormous resources, and the necessary committment is unlikely to be found. The UN needs to start much earlier, bringing non-violent pressure onto states when they start the slide towards authoritarianism. This requires an Index of Human Rights to be set up in the UN which will objectively measure the human rights performance of all states year on year. This simple measure will open up an era of improving the humanitarian record of all governments.