GENEVA, The U.N. today said that questioning Saudi Arabia’s membership on the Human Rights Council is a “distraction,” a “gross oversimplification,” and an “attempt to stigmatize.”
This was the response of Philip Alston, a U.N. Human Rights Council expert who presented a report today on Saudi Arabia, to a question (see text below, video here) posed in the plenary of the 47-nation body by Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights group.
Alston, a prominent NYU scholar who serves as the U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, said that “with countries like Saudi Arabia” what is needed is “engagement.”
