United Nations Human Rights Council’s UPR

UPR stands for Universal Periodic Review. It is a process to review how far all the countries that are members of the United Nations follow the demands made by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).

This year, our country, Malaysia will be reviewed by UNHRC. I think Malaysia is a very peaceful and fair country where all minority races are not being discriminated by our government.

Must all the United Nations members agree to all of the UNHRC demands? I feel that not every country needs to be the same as other countries and follow the same universal rules because every country and its citizen is unique and has different needs and values.

For example, Malaysia is an Islamic country while Roman Catholicism is the official religion of Monaco and Argentina. So, they are all different and each country has different social values and ways of live.

So, is it fair if we want all the countries in this world to follow a set of universal rules and values agreed by other countries whose needs and values are different? I think that not only it is wrong, in fact, it is against the human rights to force a country to accept any value or rule which is not suitable for the local people of the country, against their social values, religions or can cause lots of problems to the country. And it is not right to force a country to agree on something that is actually against their Constitutions and rules of laws.

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PPMM’s NGI Round Table Discussion On UPR Human Rights Council 2013