Hittade en intressant kommentar om USAs rapport om mänskliga rättigheter som jag nämner i inlägget ”Juridiken” nedan. Journalisten Paul Fauvet avslöjar ett antal fel i den mocambikiska delen och konstaterar bland annat:

Perhaps the worst comes in the section on the Mozambican judicial system. The report notes, correctly, that the President appoints the Supreme Court President and Deputy President, and that the regulatory body for judges, the Supreme Council for the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), submits a list of qualified potential nominees to the President. But it then adds ”Members of the CSMJ tended to be either Frelimo members or Frelimo-affiliated. The President also makes all other judicial appointments”.

So the US State Department apparently believes that President Armando Guebuza himself appoints every judge to every district and provincial court in the country. And how does the US embassy (the real author of this chapter) know the political affiliations of CSMJ members? Has it spoken to them all?

Diplomats claim they compile these reports from government sources, other politicians, NGOs, and the media. But the source for this particular paragraph is none of these. The source is the 2007 report, from which the paragraph was copied verbatim. And the 2007 report copied it from the 2006 report, which copied it from the 2005 report.

A good deal of the 2008 report is in fact copied and pasted from the 2007 report. Is this human laziness, or a function of the fact that US diplomats in Maputo have too many other tasks to produce a decent report on human rights?

Fauvet radar upp exempel på felaktigheter om Mocambique som tydligen förekommit år efter år i USAs rapport:

Almost a decade and a half ago, reacting to the annual attacks on the judiciary in these reports, the President of the Supreme Court, Mario Mangaze, threw down the gauntlet. He claimed that the Mozambican court system contains better guarantee of independence than the American one, and declared his willingness to debate the matter in public. That was in 1995, and to date no American diplomat has accepted the challenge.

Fauvet går även till hårt angrepp mot USA och dess rätt att anklaga andra länder för bristande mänskliga rättigheter:

The report also notes that land mines continue to kill and main Mozambican citizens. It does not note that Mozambique, unlike the United States, is a signatory to the Ottawa Convention that bans the production, use, sale and transport of anti-personnel land mines. While counties such as Mozambique painstakingly remove land mines from their soil, the United States reserves the right to use them. The US was also conspicuously absent from the Oslo meeting in December 2008, where 95 countries (including Mozambique) signed a convention to outlaw cluster bombs.

Why is none of this in a report on global human rights? Because ”we don’t do self-assessments”, according to the charge d’affaires at the US embassy in Maputo, Todd Chapman. In that case, why should the rest of the world take the report seriously?

The diplomats employed by the government of a nation with enormous human rights abuses of its own are taking it upon themselves to lecture the rest of the world about human rights.

Artikeln av Paul Fauvet finns publicerad i sin helhet på http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100010243&docId=l:933236717&start=2