UN rights council delves into US voter I.D. laws

The controversy over requiring voters to provide photo IDs has reached the world stage.
The United Nations Human Rights Council is investigating the issue of American election laws at its gathering on minority rights in Geneva, Switzerland.. This, despite the fact that some members of the council have only in the past several years allowed women to vote, and one member, Saudi Arabia, still bars women from the voting booth completely.
Officials from the NAACP are presenting their case against U.S. voter ID laws, arguing to the international diplomats that the requirements disenfranchise voters and suppress the minority vote.


Eight states have passed voter ID laws in the past year, voter ID proposals are pending in 32 states and the Obama administration has recently moved to block South Carolina and Texas from enacting their voter ID measures.
"This really is a tactic that undercuts the growth of your democracy," said Hillary Shelton, the NAACP's senior vice president for advocacy, about voter photo ID requirements.
In a Fox News interview prior to his trip, Shelton said the message from the NAACP delegation to the Human Rights Council is that the photo ID law "undercuts the integrity of our government, if you allow it to happen. It's trickery, it's a sleight-of-hand. We're seeing it happen here and we don't want it to happen to you, and we are utilizing the U.N. as a tool to make sure that we are able to share that with those countries all over the world."
The United Nations has no legal jurisdiction over the American electoral system, which Shelton acknowledges. Asked whether he thinks that the U.N. should be involved in domestic American laws, he answered, "No, not specifically. The U.N. should certainly be involved in sharing a best practice for the world."
"We're the greatest country on the face of the earth, but we can be better still," he said.
The NAACP had scheduled two American citizens to present their claims at the U.N. panel who, the group says, worry they will be disenfranchised by the requirement to present a photo ID to vote. The civil rights group says one, Kemba Smith Pradia, was convicted of a drug-related offense and is concerned that if she moves back to Virginia from the Midwest, state law will block her voting because of her record, even though she was granted clemency by President Bill Clinton.
A second American, Austin Alex, is a Texas Christian University student. The NAACP says he is worried that he will be barred from voting because he only holds an out-of-state driver's license and a non-government student ID, not a Texas issued photo ID.
But supporters of photo ID requirements argue that states provide such identifications for free, and in some cases, voters can cast provisional or absentee ballots that do not even require a photo ID. The NAACP disputes those claims.
In 2008, the United States Supreme Court upheld the voter photo ID law enacted in Indiana.
The U.N. Human Rights Council members include communist China and Cuba. In addition, several Arab nations are on the council that have only granted the right to vote to women in recent years, such as Kuwait in 2005 and Qatar in 2003. Women in the Republic of Moldova have had the right to vote for less than 20 years.
Council member Saudi Arabia announced six months ago that women will be granted the right to vote, but that change does not go into effect until 2015.
"The idea that this is a human rights abuse is ridiculous," said Hans von Spakovsky, a voter fraud expert and senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, in Washington, D.C.
"The UN allowing this to take place under their roof makes them, unfortunately, complicit in what really is a publicity stunt by the NAACP, and I think it wastes their time, when they should be going after real and sustained human rights abuses like the things going on in horrible places, like North Korea."
Spakovsky, who supports voter photo ID laws, says it is a hypocritical and meaningless waste of time to present a case against American electoral laws at the UN forum.
"I think the leadership of the NAACP is, quite frankly, doing a disservice to American citizens and the democracy that we have here, by going abroad to the Human Rights Council, which is filled with dictatorships and other countries that actually and really abuse human rights."
He called the council's weighing of U.S. laws "an insult to the United States that the NAACP thinks we should be getting advice from those kinds of countries, which are not democracies, on how to administer elections in this country.”
But Shelton argues that the NAACP's presence at the Geneva conference can teach other nations how to improve their electoral systems.
"We can learn a lot from those who haven't gone through as much as we have," he said.
"Everyone has a different struggle, but there's lessons to learn from whoever we come across ... but there's also some things I think we can still help teach the rest of the world."


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/14/un-delves-into-us-voter-id-laws/#ixzz1p7VNs7yx

Obama administration demands UN reform -- but won't threaten to withhold funding

With presidential elections looming, the Obama administration has launched a high-profile campaign in favor of belt-tightening at the United Nations -- but without the threat of withholding U.S. funding for the sprawling world organization.

The aim, at least in part, is to preempt even tougher action proposed by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, which calls for selective U.S. funding cutoffs unless specific demands for U.N. reform and transparency are met.

Unlike the Republican proposals, the administration’s campaign, spearheaded by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. for Management and Reform Joseph Torsella, explicitly rules out withholding of U.S. financial aid and counts on persuasion to propel its agenda of efficiency, transparency and openness. Whether U.N. bureaucrats and their developing world supporters will be impressed remains to be seen.

Torsella’s effort -- and even his appointment -- nonetheless represents a sea change on the part of the administration, which did not even have a full-time diplomat assigned to the reform effort until Torsella was sworn in last April. Even so, Torsella’s expertise in the area is newly minted: prior to his swearing in, he was head of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education. Prior to that, he served as founder and head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Currently, the U.S. pays 22 percent of the U.N. Secretariat’s $5.2 billion regular biennial budget, and 27 percent of peacekeeping, as well as greater or lesser amounts of a host of other programs. Last year, the State Department said the U.S. gave U.N. funds, programs and agencies about $7.4 billion, but that may still understate U.S. largesse.

Among the main elements of the reform campaign:

-- significant future cuts in the fast-expanding, multibillion-dollar U.N. “regular” budget; and a “comprehensive reform” of the U.N.’s “broken” budget process.

-- a pay freeze for top U.N. officials, mirroring a freeze in existence for top U.S. civil servants ordained in 2010, and a staff reduction through attrition to “right-size” the bureaucracy by 2015. The U.S. first tried to get the freeze installed last September; instead, top U.N. officials in New York got a roughly 3 percent pay hike.

-- a comparative study of “seriously distorted” U.N. pay for senior officials, who now earn, according to U.S. calculations, nearly 130 percent of their U.S. equivalents, and a “new look” at U.N. benefits ranging from health care to vacations to pensions.

-- greater scope and protection for the U.N.’s internal watchdogs to look into waste, fraud and mismanagement, and publicly air the results, along with greater openness in U.N. budget proceedings.

-- a louder and more public effort to keep human rights and nuclear proliferation outlaws like Iran and North Korea out of U.N. committee chairmanships and other key positions -- roles they have recently won.

-- a coordinated effort by the relative handful of U.N. donor countries -- roughly a score pay most of the U.N.’s bills -- to force the hydra-headed U.N. bureaucracy to focus on better results and “real world outcomes,” as Torsella put it, rather than bureaucratic process.

Click here for the full U.N. reform agenda.

Just how convincing the reform campaign will be is unclear. The hidebound, bloated and inefficient U.N. is already suffering, according to internal documents obtained by Fox News, from a “crisis in confidence” in the 43,700-member organization headed by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has been assembling his own variations on a reform agenda.

Ban, however, is largely responsible for the U.N. hiring binge that the U.S. now wants to restrain.

At the same time, he has been publicly excoriated by key U.N. budget committees for a “failure of management” in the continuing fiasco of a high-tech, $315 million computer and software system that is supposed to be the key to future U.N. management reform. The project, adrift for more than a year, is now three years behind its original schedule and not slated for completion until 2015.

Deploying 21st century information technology to improve the U.N.’s performance is nonetheless another mainstay of the Obama administration’s reform offensive.

Ban was also rebuffed by U.N. member states in a bid to gain greater authority over the micromanaged U.N. budget process by increasing his ability to move unspent money around in the organization at his own discretion to meet new or unexpected needs. The U.N. General Assembly currently allows Ban to spend up to $10 million that way each year; Ban had asked for an increase to $15 million. A key U.N. budget oversight committee said Ban had not put forward “any new arguments or rationale” for his case.

For its part, Ban’s office maintains that his proposal has not been rejected and will be taken up again in April. “We therefore have to await the related discussion and the resulting outcome,” a spokesman for Ban told Fox News.

So far, the biggest victory claimed by Torsella and his U.N. reformers is a slight reduction in the U.N.’s recently passed biennial “regular” budget, to $5.15 billion for 2012-2013.

It was, Torsella told the Washington branch of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations late last week, “the first U.N. regular budget since 1998 that’s gone down in comparison to the previous budget’s actual expense.” Torsella said the cut amounted to a 5 percent U.N. budget decrease compared with the previous biennium, and at least a $260 million saving.

Torsella’s comparison, however, is slightly misleading. U.N. spending totals have always tended to grow through a process of programming creep as the budget cycle progresses. Compared to the starting, rather than the ending, point of the 2010-2011 budget cycle, the new U.N. proposal is only about $44 million, or 0.8 percent, lower than at the same point in the previous cycle. All the remaining savings are still speculative.

The administration is “taking baby steps forward” on the U.N. reform agenda, says Brett Schaefer, an expert on U.N. financing at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “It’s still not nearly what we need to see.” U.S. claims that it has successfully held the line on U.N. spending in the current budget, he adds, are “jumping the gun.”

The administration’s transparency agenda has also not fared well out of the starting gate. An effort by the head of the U.N.’s watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Service (OIOS) to post all of her units audits publicly online was held up by what Torsella called “a small group of member states,” though the U.S. Mission to the U.N. claims to post most of them on its own website.

The last posted OIOS audits on the USUN website yesterday, however, dated from September 2011, and the posting was not comprehensive.

Whatever its limitations, the administration’s reform effort has been loudly backed by such pro-U.N. groups as the lobbying subsidiary of the Better World Fund, originally funded by billionaire Ted Turner to further the U.N.’s agenda, and whose board is heavily studded with current and former U.N. officials and officeholders. (Many of the same board members also sit on the board of the U.N. Foundation, which Turner also chairs, and which fund-raises and creates partnerships to support U.N. initiatives.)

All of those groups vociferously oppose any notion of using U.S. financial contributions to the U.N. as a club in the reform effort.

Exactly the opposite approach, however, is taken by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House International Affairs committee, and one of the world organization’s sharpest congressional critics, who insists that “the U.N. is fundamentally flawed and needs fundamental reform, not tactical tinkering.”

“While I appreciate Ambassador Torsella’s efforts,” she told Fox News, “from the beginning the administration’s strategy has fallen short of the fundamental reforms we need.” It “does not use our strongest leverage -- our contributions -- to demand real change. To the contrary, the administration surrenders our leverage by insisting that we pay our contributions to the U.N. in full, no matter what. As long as this continues, real reform efforts are destined to fail.”

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/01/25/obama-administration-launches-campaign-to-demand-un-reform-transparency/#ixzz1kVhDiWBu

UN visit to Tehran set for Jan 28

VIENNA (AP) - A senior U.N. nuclear agency team will visit Tehran on Jan. 28 with Iran saying it is ready after years of refusal to discuss allegations that it was involved in secret nuclear weapons work, diplomats said Thursday.Diplomats have previously said that International Atomic Energy Agency officials were discussing such a trip with their Iranian counterparts. But before the diplomats' comments Thursday, no date - or indication that Iran was ready to talk about the allegations - had been mentioned.Any follow-through on the part of Iran on its reported pledge to discuss nuclear arms suspicions would be significant.For more than three years, Tehran has blocked IAEA attempts to follow up on U.S. and other intelligence alleging covert Iranian work on nuclear arms, dismissing the charges as baseless and insisting all its nuclear activities were peaceful and under IAEA purview.Faced with Iranian stonewalling, the IAEA summarized its body of information in November, in a 13-page document drawing on 1,000 pages of intelligence. It stated then for the first time that some of the alleged experiments can have no other purpose than developing nuclear weapons.Iran continues to deny the charges and no change in its position is expected during the Tehran talks with IAEA officials. But even a decision to enter a discussion over the allegations would be a major departure from outright refusal to talk about them - and create hopes of future progress in the investigation.Two diplomats told The Associated Press that Iranian officials had suggested they were ready to talk about the issue during recent meetings with officials of the Vienna-based IAEA. They asked for anonymity because their information was confidential.Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's chief IAEA delegate, declined to be drawn on what would be discussed in Tehran, indicating in comments to The AP that it was too early to go public with details.The composition of the IAEA team, as described by one of the diplomats, also reflects the significance the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency attaches to the visit, which is expected to conclude in the first few days of February.Normally such trips are made by Deputy Director General Herman Nackaerts, in charge of the Iran nuclear file, and more junior officials of his department. But the diplomat said that this time Nackaerts will be accompanied by Assistant Director General Rafael Grossi, the right-hand to IAEA chief Yukiya Amano, and Peri Lynne Johnson, the agency's senior legal official.Johnson is the only American among the three. While IAEA officials are formally neutral, her citizenship is of potential significance considering the high tension-level between Washington and Tehran.Beyond the dispute over Iran's nuclear intentions, U.S.-Iranian relations have been further burdened by an Iranian announcement that a joint U.S.-Iranian national will be executed after being found guilty of spying - a charge both he and Washington denies.Iran, in turn, sees possible U.S. complicity in a series of assassinations of its nuclear experts - the latest Wednesday, when scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan was killed by a bomb attached to his car by a passing bicyclist.In a letter to the U.N. secretary-general on Thursday, Iran's U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee called on the U.N. to condemn the killing and two earlier attacks that left two nuclear scientists dead and another seriously injured."There is firm evidence that certain foreign quarters are behind such assassinations. As has been claimed by these circles, such terrorist acts have been carried out as part of the efforts to disrupt Iran's peaceful nuclear program, under the false assumption that diplomacy alone would not be enough for that purpose," the letter read in part.U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton denied any U.S. role in the slaying and the U.S administration condemned the attacks. Israeli officials, in contrast, have hinted at covert campaigns against Iran without directly admitting involvement.Beyond urging Iranian cooperation with the IAEA probe of the alleged weapons work, the U.S. and its allies are pressuring Iran to halt uranium enrichment, a key element of the nuclear program that dozens of nations suspect is aimed at producing atomic weapons. Uranium enriched to low levels can be used as nuclear fuel, but at higher levels it can be used as material for a nuclear warhead.Iran denies it is trying to make nuclear weapons, saying its program is for peaceful purposes only and is geared toward generating electricity.Those claims were called into question on Monday when the IAEA confirmed Iran had begun increasing its production of uranium enriched to 20 percent. That's a significantly higher concentration than the nation's main stockpile - and can be turned into weapons-grade material more quickly than the lower enriched uranium.Olli Heinonen, Nackaert's predecessor, noted that "if Iran decides to produce weapons-grade uranium from 20 percent enriched uranium, it has already technically undertaken 90 percent of the enrichment effort required.""This does not automatically mean Iran will be able to build a nuclear weapon in one month - building an atomic bomb is a complex endeavor that requires precision engineering capabilities that Iran may lack," wrote Heinonen, in a commentary for Foreign Policy magazine. "But it does mean that the country would be able to 'break out' of its international obligations very quickly should it decide to do so."