Here are the ppl who report to the Human right in Geneva if you ask
Khaddafi Prize Founder Addresses UN General Assembly Today
Today in New York the UN General Assembly's committee on human rights will be addressed by Jean Ziegler, one of whose titles is UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food. He also happens to be vice-president of the "Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize" organization. According to a coalition of 20 human rights and other non-governmental organizations, including victims of the Libyan regime, the credibility of Mr. Ziegler's mandate as a human rights expert is jeopardized by the fact of his being politically and financially beholden to a dictator responsible for some of the world's most brutal abuses.
The Khaddafi Prize was established by the Libyan regime with Mr. Ziegler's help in 1989. Founded in Geneva with capital of ten million dollars, the prize was designed as a propaganda tool several months after Libyan agents bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The prize has since been awarded to several individuals accused of racism and anti-Semitism, including Louis Farrakhan and Mahathir Mohammed, as well as convicted Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy. Other winners of the award include anti-Western leaders such as Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, and organizations who lobbied at the UN against the sanctions imposed on Libya after the Lockerbie bombing. Although he now denies it, according to Libya's state-controlled news agency, Mr. Ziegler himself won the award in 2002, in the same year as Garaudy. Awardees have received two hundred thousand dollars or more in Libyan prize money.
As recently documented by UN Watch and reported in a front page exposé in the leading Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung , Mr. Ziegler is vice-president of a group of interconnected organizations in Geneva known as "North South XXI" that manage and award the Khaddafi Prize. Government records, UN documents and international news sources show that, despite recent (and constantly changing) denials by Mr. Ziegler, he played a leading role in founding the Khaddafi Prize, has maintained an ongoing relationship with the Prize organization, and himself won—but did not disclose his connections to—the Prize in 2002.
Mr. Ziegler's ties to the Khaddafi Prize conflict with the high standards of independence, impartiality and integrity required of a Special Rapporteur. An independent UN human rights expert should not be connected to any government, let alone a dictatorship that is routinely rated among Freedom House's Worst of the Worst human rights abusing regimes. Quite simply, although he clothes himself in the language of human rights, Mr. Ziegler is a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Notwithstanding Libya's recent renunciation of weapons of mass destruction in return for international favor, Khaddafi continues to rule by fiat, denying freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and other basic civil rights and liberties. Security forces have the power to pass sentence without trial. Arbitrary arrest and torture are commonplace. The Libyan government is seeking to execute five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, on trumped-up charges that they contaminated 400 children with HIV/AIDS.
Jean Ziegler's entanglement with the Libyan regime is not the only example of his disrespect for the standards that UN human rights experts are supposed to uphold. In the six years he has held the position, Mr. Ziegler has consistently abused his UN mandate, neglecting genuine food emergencies around the world in order to further a radical political agenda. Among his bizarre claims is the charge that the U.S. is committing "genocide" against Cuba.
If Ziegler's rhetoric and antics at the UN seem reminiscent of Hugo Chavez, it should come as no surprise that the Venezuelan dictator is not only the 2004 laureate of Ziegler's Khadaffi Prize, but—in that same year—officially nominated Ziegler for a second UN post, to be a member of the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights. (Alas, the fact that Ziegler is Swiss and not Venezuelan apparently confused UN officials, and he was not elected.)
Last year Mr. Ziegler became the first UN rights expert to be publicly criticized by Secretary-General Annan and High Commissioner for Human Rights Arbour, after he compared Israelis to Nazi concentration camp guards.
Mr. Ziegler's ritual anti-Israel polemics were on display again recently at the Human Rights Council. On October 4, he presented a report on this summer's conflict in Lebanon that went far beyond food issues, broadly condemning Israeli "war crimes," yet making no mention of Hezbollah. “I refuse to describe Hezbollah as a terrorist organization,” said Ziegler in a Sept. 19, 2006 interview with Al Akhbar , a Lebanese newspaper. “It is a national movement of resistance. . . I can understand Hezbollah when they kidnap soldiers in order to exchange them.” Mr. Ziegler's one-sided report to the council stood in marked contrast to the report of four other Special Rapporteurs, presented on the same day, which at least made an attempt at balance by addressing actions by both Israel and Hezbollah.
At the same Council meeting where Mr. Ziegler presented his anti-Israel diatribe, North-South XXI—his phony, Libyan-run NGO—was one of only four groups that the UN allowed to take the floor. The individual who spoke for it was actually the representative of a Lebanese group with known Hezbollah links. Not surprisingly, he effusively praised Mr. Ziegler's report and echoed his call that Israeli officials be tried for "war crimes".
Regrettably, so long as Mr. Ziegler fails to own up to his past—and fails to resign from and sever all of his connections to "Institut Nord-Sud," "Fondation Nord-Sud pour le dialogue interculturel," or "North-South XXI," all of which have been exposed as a front for the Moammar Khaddafi Human Rights Prize organization—he will continue to cast a dark shadow upon the Human Rights Council, and upon the UN as a whole.