Human Rights Wronged

United Nations: The U.S. State Department is holding up Arizona as America's human rights problem, fishing for applause from the likes of Cuba and Libya. But Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer isn't taking it lying down.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton managed to go lower than even Andrew Young in his Carter-era heyday by holding up Arizona as a human rights violator in its groveling "Universal Periodic Review" for the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission.
The 29-page mea culpa of America's wrongs is nothing but a political advertisement for recent executive acts from the Obama administration, repackaged as human rights improvements.
Apologizing for legitimate domestic political differences is pernicious, given that hellish non-democratic nations like Cuba and Libya sit on the U.N. Human Rights Commission and no doubt are applauding. On human rights, the report managed to equate Arizona to Burma's tin-pot rule, Saudi Arabia's Shariah-law maimings, Iran's electoral fraud, and Cuba's "preventive" jailings of the innocent, obscenely blurring the lines between real human rights violations and mere policy differences.
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, to her credit, wrote a letter expressing "concern and indignation" to Clinton on Aug. 27, demanding that the reference to Arizona be removed.
She's right. The report's reference is a distortion of SB 1070, the state law Arizona passed to discourage illegal immigration and undercut the deadly Mexican cartels behind it. Brewer noted the cartels have left 170 dead bodies in Arizona's desert so far this year and pose a mortal danger to Arizona's citizens.
Moreover, Brewer points out that the Arizona law mirrors federal law, raising questions about why the law is considered a human rights violation if federal agents, but not state lawmen, can ask for ID from people who've already been arrested.
More to the point, Brewer underscored the hypocrisy of the federal stance, which hasn't managed to find any human rights grounds for challenging the law in court.
"In fact, the Department of Justice has correctly not included these so-called 'human rights' issues in the current litigation against the State of Arizona," Brewer wrote.
What it adds up to is an Obama administration that seeks to take its political battles to questionable forums like the U.N., using dissident states as its villains. It's a nasty abrogation of the U.S. duty to speak out on real human rights and, in the end, will only give comfort to tyrants and criminals.(IBD)