Information Supplement Booklet
Greetings Delegates!
First and foremost, let me welcome all of you to the Human Rights Council at EMUN 2006-07. After last year’s smashing success, we look forward to having committee charged up again.
Delegates, we expect maximum effort you. Remember, committee does not translate into ‘Come Meet and Tea.’ (Com- Mit-Tee) Come prepared, and ready to work! (The Chair would like to remind you of the dreaded ‘R’ word- Research!)
The HRC will consist of approximately 35 delegates. We will follow conventional parliamentary procedure, along the lines of discussions, working papers, and finally resolutions. Both topic areas will be discussed and (hopefully) resolved.
As the Chair we will do our best and make EMUN 2006-07 an experience of a lifetime. Healthy, high quality debate will be our number one priority. Of course, the ever popular, never forgettable Motions of Entertainment will also be in order. So start practicing your hip shakes and bathroom singing today!
A final piece of valuable information: As you are often warned to ‘Beware of Dogs’, the Chair asks you to ‘Beware of lame jokes.’ I, Raveena Taurani, the Chair without the table, am renowned for my extremely dangerous sense of humour. If Global warming, nuclear attacks, alien invasions and World War 3 don’t kill you, my jokes will. Delegates with an equally pathetic sense of humor are requested to sign up to the HRC. (They will be recognized more often)
So delegates, we are looking forward to seeing you in committee. It is imperative that you come well researched and enthusiastic to work. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions, doubts, or lame jokes to share.
Till then, Enjoy!
Raveena Taurani
Director HRC.
Topic Area 1: Safeguarding Human Rights in Central Africa
Congolese Minister beaten, stripped in London
Afrol News, 13 October - A senior minister of Congo Kinshasa (DRC), Leonard She Okitundu, was beaten and stripped off by a crowd of baseball bat-wielding thugs in North London. His assailants also stole his passport, wallet, credit cards and his underpants and went ahead to publish photographs of the incident and stolen property on the Internet.
Mr Okitundu, who is President Joseph Kabila's directeur de cabinet, told 'Africa Confidential' that the attack was a planned ambush by his political opponents. As if the thugs had advanced notice of Mr Okitundu's arrival, they decided to surround his car as it drew up outside the offices of Original Black Entertainment, a television channel based in Park Royal, London. Mr Okitundu and two colleagues - former ambassador Henri Nswana and his party's UK chairman, Placide Mbatika - were assaulted on their way to take part in a programme about the second round of presidential elections in Congo Kinshasa. He expressed rage over the attitude of nurses of Middlesex Central Hospital, who had left him covered in a blanket without trousers. "The police didn't seem to care. No one helped me and I was naked, that would never happen in my country," he said, adding that no one cared about him, even though he had explained his position to them.
Mr Okitundu's assailants posted pictures of his suit, business cards of MPs and officials he had met that day and even condoms that were found in his pocket. His underpants were not also spared for publication.
Mr Okitundu blamed the Foreign Office in London for not helping him but British officials, who had informed President Kabila about the development, said he had never sought for security. The disgraced politician was in London to drum up support for Mr Kabila's second round of elections. His visit was unofficial, which was why he was not covered by diplomatic protection, although he had met several British MPs, journalists and government officials. He said his attackers accused him of working for Rwandans and that they would kill anybody who obstructs Mr Bemba from becoming President. "This is part of their campaign to sabotage President Kabila's presidential campaign. To my knowledge, these people didn't act of their own will. They have been told to do it," he claimed.
This is the situation in Congo which is only one of the countries in Central Africa. Today countries throughout central Africa are suffering from the same problem, which is of not having sufficient safeguarding facilities in order to protect their human rights. Since the mid-1990s a cycle of political-military uprisings has destabilized and further impoverished the countries in Central Africa. Presidential elections held in May 2005 in the Central African Republic were an important step in a transitional process aimed at restoring constitutional order and achieving the political stability needed for renewed economic growth and development. In welcoming the results of the 2005 elections, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan also drew attention to ongoing problems. He noted the fragile political dialogue and the precarious socioeconomic situation as well as deteriorating humanitarian conditions and the insecurity fueling internal displacement and the flight of thousands of refugees to neighboring Chad and Cameroon. He called on international community to continue to assist the Central African Republic as it tries to rebuild its economy and to consolidate democracy.
Topic Area 2: Rights of Immigrants in North America
The demonstrations, strikes and boycotts by immigrant workers in cities across the United States are an indication of a sharpening of the class struggle, both in the US and internationally. Literally millions took to the streets May 1 in cities from Los Angeles to New York, Miami to Seattle and scores of towns in between. This mass protest movement, which has been building since March, is without precedent in both its size and its national scope. Those who demonstrated and walked off their jobs did so in defiance of warnings by President Bush as well as Democratic politicians. They also took action in the face of naked intimidation posed by recent nationwide factory raids, as well as threats of arrest and deportation by the government and violence by elements of the extreme right. A layer of workers treated as social pariahs by the US government has suddenly emerged as a militant, potent and vocal social force. These actions by the most oppressed and exploited section of the American working class have deep social and political roots and a far-reaching objective significance. At the same time, they urgently pose the problems in the development of political consciousness within the working class as a whole that must be overcome. The demonstrations have unfolded under increasingly tense and unstable political conditions within the US. Poll after poll shows the Bush administration receiving support from barely a third of the American people. What accounts for this unprecedented political collapse? Neither the mass media nor the ostensible opposition party, the Democrats, has posed any consistent or serious challenge to the White House over either the war, the wholesale assault on democratic rights or domestic policies that serve to transfer wealth from the masses of working people to the top 1 percent. Yet, three years into the illegal war against Iraq, the actions carried out by the Bush administration, combined with an accelerating deterioration of living standards and historically unprecedented social polarization, are beginning to have a profound effect on popular consciousness. A sharp social divide is creating conditions for social upheavals in America. And the immigrant protests will undoubtedly come to be seen as the prologue to massive class battles in the center of world capitalism. The truism that America is a “nation of immigrants” has always served to conceal the fierce conflicts and intense social contradictions that have characterized mass immigration to the US. The wave of immigrants from Europe at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century provided the main source of labor power for the explosive growth of US manufacturing. And their radicalization gave rise to the first mighty waves of struggle of the modern American working class.