UN GATE / SDNY COURT, Dec 28 – Even when leaving the UN and retiring, its supposed human rights officials hold their tongues about the abuses by China, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong to Tibet.
The most recent example is Andrew Gilmour, who as UN Human Rights representative in New York did nothing when UNSG Antonio Guterres had Inner City Press roughed up and banned from entering to ask questions, now 543 days.
Gilmour told Inner City Press, out on the sidewalk in front of the UN, that he was sorry for what had happened - as if he had no power to do anything about it, and was not in fact complicit.
If a "senior human rights officials of the UN," as AP calls him, cannot do anything about violent censorship by the UN inside its own headquarters in New York, what good is he? He is only a quote-box, and not even that.
From AP: "'I never thought that we would start hearing the terms "concentration camps" again,'' Gilmour told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview. 'And yet, in two countries of the world there's a real question.'' He didn't name them but appeared to be referring to China's internment camps in western Xinjiang province, where an estimated 1 million members of the country's predominantly Muslim Uighur minority are being held; and detention centers on the United States' southern border, where mostly Central American migrants are being held while waiting to apply for asylum."
So while banned Inner City Press' human rights questions remain UNanswered, Gilmour gave an "exclusive" interview in which he coyly referred to concentration camps, letting China off the hook and allowing a dubious equivalence. And people still rightly deride the US for dancing around the "G word" with regard to Rwanda in 1994.
The UN's outgoing human rights official, complicit in Guterres' censorship for himself and China, can't even say the word Uighur. We'll have more on this, and on the others still in the pay of Guterres -- with the public's money -- and still inactive and complicit.
