Drone attacks: Complaint to UN panel planned

[The Northerner]

ISLAMABAD: The government told the National Assembly on Tuesday it was planning to complain to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) against frequent deadly US drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas to target militant hideouts, but held the Punjab government as the main culprit for most domestic human rights violations.

“Drone strikes are definitely a human rights issue,” the prime minister’s adviser on human rights, Mustafa Nawaz Khokhar, said while winding up an opposition-sought discussion on what 13 lawmakers of the Pakistan Muslim League-N called in a joint motion “the dismal condition of human rights in Pakistan”, with some who spoke largely blaming the Pakistan People’s Party-led federal coalition government, which they also said failed to halt the strikes by unmanned spy planes targeting suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries but also killing local civilians in parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) bordering Afghanistan.

“We are collecting data” about the civilian killings and other collateral damage so the government could take the issue to the UNHRC, the adviser said. But he acknowledged the council, made up of 47 states as an inter-governmental body within the UN system, had a “limited mandate” not providing for direct intervention.

But he gave no timeframe when Islamabad will go to the council, which was created by the UN General Assembly in 2006 as a successor to the former United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Read more: http://www.dawn.com/2011/11/23/drone-attacks-complaint-to-un-panel-planned.html

[teddy51]

1. Not sure why Pakistan is not shooting these drones down, but they should be. n/t

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. The government of Pakistan is on the U.S. payroll is why they aren't being shot down.

[teddy51]

3. So whats their point in bitching to the UN about drone strikes then? n/t

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

4. CYA for the domestic audience.