While specialists have always recognized that hunger is a complex issue and that underdevelopment cannot be measured by the number of hungry, the poster image of the underfed child has always served to draw attention to a new crisis, or a new refugee flow.
While the Human Rights Council has focused only on a small number of States where human rights are abused - basically the Israel-Palestine conflict, the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, and Darfur, Sudan - the Council has played a key role in building awareness of the growing flow, world wide, of human trafficking.
The United Nations Human Rights Council has just finished at the end of June 2007 its first year as the new human rights framework. The Council replaced the UN Commission on Human Rights, which was a subsidiary body of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). When the UN Charter was being drafted in the early months of 1945, no one expected that human rights would come to play such a large role in the UN's work.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the newly elected French President, wanted to mark the difference in governing style between himself and outgoing President Jacques Chirac - although both belonged to the same political party and shared basic political orientations. Thus Sarkozy ran on a program of a "break with the stagnant past" as though he had not been a member of the outgoing government. Sarkozy
Mohamed ElBaradei, Director of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called on Iran and Israel to enter into serious negotiations to create a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East - a zone in which both Israel and Iran would be members. He was speaking on April 15, 2007 following talks in Jordan with King Abdullah II. Jordan, caught between Iraq and growing tensions between Israel and Palestine, has been trying to play a more active role of regional peacemaker.
Benjamin Dangl has written a detailed and first-hand study of popular social movement in
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019