Libya should be suspended from Human Rights Council of the United Nations

The Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) calls for the suspension of Libya from the UN Human Rights Council. "It is not right that starting next week Libya will be once again advising the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on the international human rights situation while their ruler Muammar al-Qaddafi has his forces shooting at demonstrators," stated the head of the Africa section at the STP, Ulrich Delius, on Monday in Göttingen. "When witnesses report massacres and conditions similar to civil war on the streets in Libya, the United Nations cannot simply act as though nothing is happening. The Human Rights Council would lose its last vestige of credibility."

Libya is one of the 47 member nations of the UN Human Rights Council, which will begin its 16th session on 28 February 2011. Libya's election to the council was highly controversial from the start. This Arab country is set to have a regular seat on the council until 2013. A member nation can be suspended by a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly when grave and systematic human rights abuses are committed.

"An unjust regime that uses its security forces and foreign mercenaries to massacre its own people has to have forfeited the right to sit in judgment on the observance of human rights in other countries," asserted Delius. Before a country is selected for membership on the Council, the efforts by the country toward the promotion and protection of human rights as defined in the UN's own guidelines must be examined.

Since Libyan head of state Muammar al-Qaddafi apparently can no longer depend on his own security forces, he is hiring mercenaries from neighboring African countries to suppress the national uprising. "This is racism in its worst form," said Delius. "As recently as 2010, Qaddafi oversaw the random and violent deportation of thousands of African immigrants, some of whom had been living in Libya for years."