Human Rights Council Biggest Abusers

In December 2009 the watchdog group UN Watch issued a report showing that the Human Rights Council had effectively become an enabler for human-rights violators, rather than a genuine defender of human rights. Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s executive director, remarked: “Paradoxically, as our report today shows, the U.N.’s main human rights body has turned into the world’s leading sponsor of impunity for gross human rights abuses worldwide. It’s a case of the foxes guarding the chickens, with countries like China, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba and Saudi Arabia shielding each other’s abuses. Democracies should send a signal by opposing the council’s resolutions, even if they will be outvoted.
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Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that at the very end of its news story on WikiLeaks's release last weekend of documents detailing tens of thousands of casualties during the Iraq war, The New York Times revealed that for most of the last century, the average civilian-to-combatant wartime fatality ratio has been 10:1.

The Times reported (hat tip: Evelyn Gordon): "Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross."

Whereas in other modern wars, civilians account for 90 percent of casualties, by contrast in last year's Israel-Hamas war in Gaza less than half of Palestinian fatalities - 39 percent - were noncombatants - and that number would have been even lower had Hamas not stored weapons in civilian institutions and fired rockets from private Palestinian homes which it commandeered.