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First Day Trouble For New SG

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2007/01/02/D8MDE8K00.html

Quote:

New U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ran into trouble on his first day of work Tuesday over Saddam Hussein's execution when he failed to state the United Nations' opposition to the death penalty and said capital punishment should be a decision of individual countries.

The U.N. has an official stance opposing capital punishment and Ban's predecessor Kofi Annan reiterated it frequently. The top U.N. envoy in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, restated it again on Saturday after the former Iraqi dictator was hanged.

Ban, however, took a different approach, never mentioning the U.N. ban on the death penalty in all its international tribunals, and the right to life enshrined in the U.N. Charter.

"Saddam Hussein was responsible for committing heinous crimes and unspeakable atrocities against Iraqi people and we should never forget victims of his crime," Ban said in response to a reporter's question about Saddam's execution Saturday for crimes against humanity. "The issue of capital punishment is for each and every member state to decide."

His ambiguous answer put a question mark over the U.N.'s stance on the death penalty. It also gave the new chief an early taste of how tricky global issues are, and how every word can make a difference.

Michele Montas, Ban's new spokeswoman, insisted there was no change in U.N. policy in what she described as "his own nuance" on the death penalty.

"The U.N. policy still remains that the organization is not for capital punishment," she said. "However, the way the law is applied in different countries, he left it open to those different countries."

The death penalty is legal in Ban's homeland, South Korea as it is in many other countries including the United States, Russia, China and much of the Middle East.

Can't have a Secretary General who admits that member states are sovereign, I guess.

And to think everybody hated on Bolton.

How is it that America continues to have capital punishment but the UN "reitirates it frequently" that it has a policy against it? I mean, doesn't that smack of hypocrisy? I'm sure people have argued this before, but I don't know a whole lot about the UN, admittedly.

Since the United States and the United Nations are two seperate entities, they can have seperate positions on issues such as capital punishment.

But isn't that what the new SG is kind of being denounced for? I mean for specifically arguing for that behavior?

And, my question before was that seeing that America is one of the permenant seats on the council, it seems a bit hypocritical to me. I can see one of the smaller nations involved having a difference of opinion, but one of the main nations is a bit hard to fathom.

Of course, I don't pretend to know or understand what exactly the link is between the United Nations and the United States; how they operate together and seperately, etc.

The United Nations is for all intents and purposes an international forum with no governing power whatsoever. None of its mandates can be truly enforced unless the most powerful entities involved decide that they want them enforced.

A bit of clarification on the role of the UN

The UN is NOT a world government. The UN is an organization which works on the co-operation of soverign governments, period. It can be a place where several governments enforce a UN resolution against a third party, such as the case with Korea, but it does not have the right to control domestic laws of member states.

Besides, even if it did have the legal authority to do so, I doubt the West would put up with Eastern laws or the East put up with Western laws. It's a matter of culture and sovereignty of states. I know that France's head-scarf laws would not fly here, nor would Canadian multicultural policies do very well in a country like Iraq.