Focus on Cuba at the UN Commission on Human Rights

The European Union also shows little sign of supporting the Cuban motion at the Human Rights Commission, to have the treatment of prisoners at the US-controlled Guantanamo base investigated. Cuba's draft Human Rights Commission motion "requests" the US to allow "an impartial and independent investigation" into the treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo base, including UN representatives from the groups investigating arbitrary detention, torture, physical and mental health and the independence of judges and lawyers.

The failure of the EU to take an independent position in this affair demonstrates its weakness and lack of moral authority. Given the absence of charges, the US refusal to accept prisoner of war conventions and the evidence of torture, the several hundred Guantanamo prisoners would seem a far more urgent human rights focus than the US agents in Havana.

Cuba is implacable in face of the US manoeuvres. It "does not recognise any legitimacy in this resolution, nor will it co-operate with the spurious mandate that it establishes". Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque says:

In Cuba we will not allow the establishment of organisations and mercenary parties financed by and at the service of the US Government. We will not allow newspapers and TV networks funded by the US Government to uphold its policies of blockade and lies among us. In Cuba the press, the radio and the TV are owned by the people and serve and will serve their interests.

Indeed, any independent state with self-respect would have to resist such pressures. These consistent “human rights” manoeuvres are the opening gambit of openly imperial “transition” plans, and the human rights consequences of such a transition would be dire. Cuba - with the best health and education standards in Latin America - could become another Haiti.

A genuine human rights focus at the UN might yet be rescued from this power politics, but not through the backing of imperial “transition” plans.