Cuba to sign int'l agreements on Human Rights...

[Che Guava]

...skeptics, start your engines..

Cuba makes human rights promise


Cuba has announced that it will sign two major UN agreements on civil and political rights and allow periodic UN monitoring of its human rights record.

Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque said Cuba would allow scrutiny by the UN Human Rights Council in 2009.

The council was established last year, replacing a body Havana had argued was manipulated by the United States.

As Mr Perez Roque spoke, government supporters mobbed dissidents who were marking International Human Rights Day.

Mr Perez Roque said Cuba would soon sign the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and a similar agreement on social, economic and cultural rights.

These two legally binding protocols, which make up the UN Bill of Human Rights, will commit Cuba, among other things, to allowing freedom of expression and association, and the right to travel abroad.

Communist Cuba had long refused to sign the agreements. Havana also refused to be visited by a special rapporteur who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Commission.

The BBC's Michael Voss in Havana says now the commission and the post of rapporteur have gone, Cuba no longer feels under threat and therefore in a position to sign the two protocols.

'Important first step'

The Cuban foreign minister told a news conference: "This decision reflects our desire for full co-operation with the UN on the basis of respect for our national sovereignty and the right of the Cuban people to their self-determination."

But as he spoke, just a few streets away from the foreign ministry a small group of opposition activists were mobbed and shouted down by government supporters, as they tried to hold a march.

Dissidents reported that police also picked up several organisers in the hours before the event.

Also on Monday, the Cuban authorities deported eight Spanish women who took part in a protest by a group called the Ladies in White, which gathers every Sunday to call for the release of their imprisoned husbands.

The Cuban government says dissidents are "mercenaries" paid for by the US and that tourists have no business meddling in the country's internal affairs.

The treatment of the protesters, our correspondent says, is a reminder that old approaches continue.

Western diplomats in Havana describe the foreign minister's announcement as an important first step, but are now awaiting to see whether and how it will be implemented, our correspondent says.

Cuba is in a period of transition with Raul Castro continuing in the post of president while Fidel recovers from surgery.

It is not clear where Mr Perez Roque's announcement fits in to this change of power, our correspondent says, but does indicate that Cuba is to some degree ready to engage more with the international community.

link

sounds like they're off to a roaring start, but I suppose you have to start somehwere...

Comments?

 

[Merkinball]

Why would Cuba need to make human rights promises? Cuba has a fantastic track record on human rights. Cuba is a glorious place with 100% literacy. And they have universal healthcare.

This, of course, helps us explain away why so many people float from the US to cuba on tires, and inflatable dingy's, and drift wood...

 

[Che Guava]

Why would Cuba need to make human rights promises? Cuba has a fantastic track record on human rights. Cuba is a glorious place with 100% literacy. And they have universal healthcare.

This, of course, helps us explain away why so many people float from the US to cuba on tires, and inflatable dingy's, and drift wood...

Yeah, it's definitely not the greatest place in the world to live, but I think a certain US embargo helps with that as well....

 

[Merkinball]

Yeah, it's definitely not the greatest place in the world to live, but I think a certain US embargo helps with that as well....

Crazy Talk! Everyone knows that free trade agreements with the US only end up in hurting the other nation. These trade agreements are designed simply to exploit the other nation, at the sole benefit to the US. It's exploitation at its finest. Cuba is better off without open relations with the US. Such trade agreements would undoubtedly lead to a proliferation of poverty in Cuba, and likely lead to degenerative literacy rates, and a lack of funding for their glorious model universal healthcare program. Castro...might -- even -- die.

 

[Fëanor]

Why would Cuba need to make human rights promises? Cuba has a fantastic track record on human rights. Cuba is a glorious place with 100% literacy. And they have universal healthcare.

This, of course, helps us explain away why so many people float from the US to cuba on tires, and inflatable dingy's, and drift wood...

Some people think that it is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven

 

[Masquerouge]

Sarcasm is nice, but if no matter what Cuba do, you're gonna torpedo it, then we have a problem.

It will probably turn out to be more words than anything, but in the case that this is actually the first step towards a more democratic Cuba, I say good for them.

 

[Strider]

It sounds promising until you reach the "UN" part of the report. Sorry, but signing something and following it are not the same thing.

 

[George2816]

Why would Cuba need to make human rights promises? Cuba has a fantastic track record on human rights. Cuba is a glorious place with 100% literacy. And they have universal healthcare.

This, of course, helps us explain away why so many people float from the US to cuba on tires, and inflatable dingy's, and drift wood...

Hey just like the USA has a fantastic track record on human rights ( torture anyone??)

 

[amadeus]

The Soviet Union also signed the Helsinki Accords in '75.

 

[I'm Cleo!]

Of course it's better that they ratify the ICCPR and the ICESCR than not, but I think everyone's rightly skeptical that they're going to carry out all of the conventions' requirements. In truth, no state fully complies with the conventions' requirements. But no matter how small, steps in the right direction are still steps in the right direction.

And regarding trade with Cuba, there are options besides "complete trade embargo" and "radical free-trade agreement." Just because a radical free-trade agreement may hurt them doesn't mean that a comprehensive embargo doesn't at all.

Cleo

 

[Princeps]

Crazy Talk! Everyone knows that free trade agreements with the US only end up in hurting the other nation.

No socialist is opposed to trade, and you're right, what are misleadingly called "free trade" agreements (of course, they have nothing to do with "free trade", in fact very little to do with "trade" at all: they're "investment" agreements.) are designed to benefit the investors and money-lenders above all.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Hey just like the USA has a fantastic track record on human rights ( torture anyone??)

If you need to compare Cuba's human rights records to a country like the US that tortures instead of the other 3 countries on the planet then you have done nothing but prove his point.

 

[CCA]

...skeptics, start your engines..




link

sounds like they're off to a roaring start, but I suppose you have to start somehwere...

Comments?

It depends on what you mean by "human rights"

In the words of prominent sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz:

"Politics is a game of vulnerabilities, and the human rights issue is clearly where the 'socialist' world has proven most vulnerable, just as the economic rights issue is where the 'capitalist' world is most open to criticism... The debate on human rights can be conceptualized in part as a struggle between eighteen century libertian persuasions and ninteenth century egalitarian beliefs- that is, from a vision of human righs having to do with the right of individual justice before the law to a recognition of the rights of individuals to social security and quitable conditions of work and standards of living"

 

[Tabasco Sauce]

Their is a reason why the UN is called the Dictators club

 

[Elrohir]

Fascinatingly enough, the USSR had a written constitution that guaranteed freedom of religion (And from antireligion propaganda), as well as freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to protest and demonstrate and to be safe in their own home - the home and private correspondance was supposedly "inviolate". How did that work out, again?

If Cuba actually does this, and they actually allow their citizens to be free, then good. But I'll be skeptical until they actually do, and I don't think signing these agreements will make a practical difference. They, like the USSR's constitution (Or the Cuban constitution, for that matter) are just pieces of paper. They have to be backed up by reality in order to work, and until they do, they're worthless. People have to believe in them as real, not just an illusion used by the government to say that they have freedoms while continuing to control them.

Again, if Cubans are given freedom, then that's good. But call me skeptical.

 

[Tabasco Sauce]

Then again... you never know.

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

Cuba follows most of this already.

 

[aronnax]

I dont remenber hearing any bad news from cuba since the... um..Cuban Missle Crisis. Do they even mistreat their citizens?

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

I dont remenber hearing any bad news from cuba since the... um..Cuban Missle Crisis. Do they even mistreat their citizens?

Not really, Cuba seems rather dead. Nothing seems to happen there.

 

[ArneHD]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba

According to the almighty wiki, there is apparently some problems yet remaining.