Thanks to UN Watch and Elizabeth Cassidy

A special thanks to Elizabeth Cassidy of UN Watch for her terrific month-long guest blogging stint at Opinio Juris. It was a first for us: guest blogging by an NGO on the ground at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. The highlights of Elizabeth’s blogging include an excellent summary of the debate over the Darfur resolution, a post about UN Watch’s own eloquent intervention at the Council (the video of which became one of the most-watched YouTube clips of that week) and her final post, concluding (in a rather understated way) that the Council meeting ended “disappointedly.”

The efforts at reform of the central UN Human Rights body that created the Council appear to have failed miserably. The likely effect of this failure is not decreased attention to human rights, but rather increased reliance by human rights NGOs and activists on alternative, effective institutions (see, e.g., the current investigation into alleged war crimes in Somalia announced by the European Commission). In the meantime, the governments of Sudan and Zimbabwe have, once again, succesfully deflected official UN scrutiny of the mass human rights atrocities for which they are responsible. Thank you Elizabeth and UN Watch for bringing additional clarity and insight to these issues.