BUSH - Scolds UN over loss of rights panel seat

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Bush Scolds U.N. Over Loss of Rights Panel Seat

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - President Bush scolded the U.N. members on Saturday for booting the United States off the U.N. Human Rights Commission earlier this year.

"The world needs its principled leadership. It undermines the credibility of this great institution, for example, when the Commission on Human Rights offers seats to the world's most persistent violators of human rights," Bush told the 189-nation U.N. General Assembly.

"The United Nations depends above all on its moral authority and that authority must be preserved," he said.

In a stunning upset, Washington had been voted off the top U.N. human rights body on May 3.

The action came on a secret ballot of the U.N. Economic and Social Council for three seats allocated to Western nations on the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Commission.

France, Austria and Sweden were the top three finishers, leaving the United States in fourth place, thus losing a seat it had held since the commission was founded in 1947.

Speculation on why it happened ranged from poor lobbying to unpaid U.S. dues to the United Nations to American condemnation of rights abuses in China, Russia, Cuba, Sudan and elsewhere.

Libya, Cuba and Syria, nations listed by the State Department as "state sponsors of terrorism," are among the countries currently holding seats on the 53-nation commission.

Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the commission's first chair and the main author of its 1948 landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

-- Anonymous, November 10, 2001


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