human rights as handmaiden to world order:
On Thursday the council’s presidency will pass to Serbia. Serbia is not the only nation in Europe involved in human rights abuses. But it is distinguished by the fact that its failures are uncontroversial. Everyone from Human Rights Watch to President Bush has urged its government to hand over Ratko Mladic – the general responsible for the Srebrenica massacre – to the tribunal in the Hague. To decide that this country is unfit to run the Council of Europe looks uncomplicated and free from political cost. If European countries can’t find the courage to act against Serbia, they can’t find the courage to act against anyone. Human rights become a dead letter.
(...) There is scarcely a government in Europe which does not have something to hide. The UK, Germany, Italy, Macedonia and even Sweden have been assisting the CIA’s programme of “extraordinary rendition”: kidnapping people and delivering them to states which will torture them on America’s behalf(7). Poland and Romania appear to have allowed the US to use secret detention centres on their soil to process them. Austria, Germany and the UK rely on worthless diplomatic assurances to justify handing refugees to governments which torture their prisoners(8). Poland warns that “teachers who reveal their homosexuality will be fired from work”(9). France supports African genocidaires. Spain repatriates unaccompanied children(10). Ukrainian police torture sex workers and force them to confess to crimes they did not commit(11). The United Kingdom bans peaceful protest and continues to occupy the country it illegally invaded. Lift a stone to throw at Serbia anywhere in Europe and you will find something unpleasant cowering there. Better to leave it on the ground. The price of being left alone by other states is the tolerance of mass murder.
(...) If you want to know the value of an institution, you need only imagine what the world would be like if it didn’t exist. If the Council of Europe were dissolved, would anyone suffer, except for the people it employs? The European Court would be missed. But the rest of it? Thanks to the member states’ agreement to ignore each other’s abuses, it is, at the moment, completely useless.