Det eneste vestlige medlemmet av den rådgivende komiteen til FNs Menneskerettsråd er sveitseren Jean Ziegler. Han står på god fot med Muammar Gaddafi og har rost revisjonisten Roger Garaudy. Nå vil Sveits at han fortsetter.

Utenriksminister Micheline Calmy-Rey har renominert Ziegler. Human Rights Council er allerede en skamplett på FN, og Ziegler er en del av problemet, mener UN Watch. Hillary Clinton møter Calmy-Rey imorgen. USA vil delta som observatør i Human Right Council. Da må USA bruke sin innflytelse, mener UN Watch.

As a former member of the Swiss parliament, Ziegler was a long-time Socialist Party ally of Ms. Calmy-Rey, whose government nominated him for re-election to the advisory committee of the UN Human Rights Council, as the only candidate of the council’s Western states. The election is scheduled for March 25th.

«When Western states choose as their UN candidate a notorious apologist of dictators and one of the world’s most virulent promoters of hatred against the West, they signal defeatism in the wrong place—and at the worst time,» said Moses. Ziegler’s latest French-language best-seller is entitled Hatred of the West.

«We urge the U.S. to lead its U.N. allies in blocking Ziegler’s election, and to take back the council for human rights, and for the dream of Eleanor Roosevelt and René Cassin embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.»

According to an article last year in The Guardian, «in 1989—four months after Libya bombed Pan Am flight 103, killing 270 people from 21 countries—Ziegler launched the annual Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize in Tripoli, boasting it was the ‘Anti-Nobel prize of the third world.’ Winners have included Fidel Castro, Louis Farrakhan, and a leader of a Ba’ath party women’s organisation in Saddam’s Iraq. In 2002, the recipients included the convicted French Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, and Ziegler himself.»

According to the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, Ziegler was a co-founder of «Nord Sud 21,» the organization that manages the Qaddafi prize.

Ziegler defended Garaudy’s writings on the Holocaust in a 1996 letter that was published by the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, a group dedicated to the promotion of Holocaust denial. «I am outraged at the legal case they are making against you,» wrote Ziegler. «All your work as a writer and philosopher attests to the rigor of your analysis and the unwavering honesty of your intentions. It makes you one of the leading thinkers of our time…. It is for all these reasons that I express here my solidarity and my admiring friendship.»