BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

10/12/2008

Bush to Meet Activists, Bloggers to Mark Human Rights Day

By VOA News

President George W. Bush makes a statement on the economy on the South Lawn of the White House, 5 Dec. 2008

U.S. President George Bush is meeting with an activist from Sudan's troubled Darfur region and bloggers from China, Burma, Egypt and other countries Wednesday to mark Human Rights Day.

A White House spokesman says Mr. Bush will first meet in the Oval Office with doctor and writer Halima Bashir to get what the spokesman called a first-hand account of what is taking place in Darfur.

Bashir is the co-author of a memoir about living in Darfur, Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur, and has spoken out internationally about the atrocities committed there.

Mr. Bush will also hold a teleconference with bloggers from Egypt and Venezuela, while bloggers from Burma, Iran, China, Cuba, and Belarus will join the president in person at the White House.

At the United Nations today, the General Assembly is marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and will award the U.N. Prize in the Field of Human Rights.

The recipients of the U.N. prize include Louise Arbour, former UN high commissioner for human rights and a former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

In a statement, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said it is his hope that the global community will act on its collective responsibility to uphold the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He said the "towering vision" of the document can only be honored when its principles are fully applied everywhere for everyone.

Meantime, five Iranian human rights groups have called on the United Nations and other international organizations to send human rights inspectors to Iran.

A spokeswoman for one of the groups, the Human Rights Reporters' Committee, told VOA, Persian News Network, that it is important to have a group of foreign inspectors that would not be under pressure from Iran's intelligence services.

Source:

http://voanews.com/english/2008-12-10-voa19.cfm

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