While I’m at it, here’s a little something Will clued me in to. There are other human rights that the UN is trying to craft declarations of, as part of its continuing efforts to establish some baselines for civilized national behaviours.
These are two quotes from what are essentially meeting minutes from a committee meeting wherein 8 such new resolutions were approved:
By a vote of 180 in favour to 1 against (United States) and no abstentions, the Committee also approved a resolution on the right to food, by which the Assembly would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population. (See Annex III.)
By the terms of the text, the Assembly would express concern that, in many countries, girls were twice as likely as boys to die from malnutrition and childhood diseases and that twice as many women as men were estimated to suffer from malnutrition. Accordingly, it would have the Assembly encourage all States to take action to address gender inequality and discrimination against women, including through measures to ensure that women had equal access to resources, including income, land and water, so as to enable them to feed themselves and their families. By further terms of the draft, the Assembly would urge Member States to promote and protect the rights of indigenous people, who have expressed in different forums their deep concerns over the obstacles and challenges faced in the full enjoyment of the right to food.
The Committee also approved a draft resolution on the rights of the child by a vote of 180 in favour to one against ( United States), with no abstentions. Among other things, that omnibus text would call upon States to create an environment conducive to the well-being of all children, including by strengthening international cooperation in regard to the eradication of poverty, the right to education, the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health, and the right to food.
You know what’s funny? In the high tech world, and I suspect in many others, we often start our presentations with a short discussion, or a few slides, containing things that everyone will agree on, before we get into the contentious stuff. In the case of my particular kinds of work, these include statements like the desire to produce high quality software, with few-to-no bugs, and which scales and performs under even very large loads. We tend to dismissively refer to these as the “motherhood and apple pie” slides–the ones that no one would ever come out against, that everyone wants to be seen as being for. (I sometimes call them the “war is bad” slides, in a mental nod to Steve Brust’s song).
You might think that in America “children under five should not starve to death, if we can avoid it” might be a motherhood and applie pie type statement. Apparently, you would be wrong. Isn’t that funny? Ha. Ha. (I told you I’d be back to cynical in a few days.)
