Talking Sense

Arnold Beichman 

Arnold Beichman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. 

The Canada Problem 

If the poet Robert Frost was right when he wrote that “Good fences make good neighbors,” then the opposite might also be true, namely, that bad fences make bad neighbors. We have just that kind of situation with our supposedly friendly neighbor to the north. Perhaps the recent meeting between President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin may do something about the dangerous disrepair of the Canadian side of the border, a situation that endangers the United States.

Criticism of the Canadian border porosity comes not from impatient Americans but is contained in a detailed report of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) officers’ union. The report describes a pretty hairy situation about which the Canadian government is presently in denial.

According to the National Post, which obtained a copy of the report:

Gaps in Canada’s border security are so severe that an airport accepts international passengers without on-site immigration checks, a marine border unit has no boat, a computer glitch systematically hides information about dangerous terrorists, and officers at 62 border crossings are unable to link to a computer to screen incoming passengers.

The picture gets worse:

• 225 unguarded Canadian cross-border roads.
• Computer systems and watch lists are unamalgamated and inaccessible.
• Important databases are unavailable to security officers.

Among the critical problems cited by CBSA officers is the Deer Lake airport in western Newfoundland. International commercial charter flights from London arrive at Deer Lake but there is no customs service to check incoming passengers and their baggage.

Utterly ridiculous is the fact that the five-man Customs Marine Verification Team which is supposed to patrol the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River and to search boats crossing the U.S.-Canada border has no boat of its own, says the National Post.

Along two of the unguarded roads in the Quebec town of Stanstead more than 250 unidentified vehicles illegally enter Canada each month. The province of Quebec has 107 unguarded roads. Anybody with time on his hands and reasonably good health can get in and out of Canada with little difficulty.

The National Post expose offered this story as an example of what did happen and what could have happened. Last summer, U.S. border agents barred entry to a man traveling from Manitoba because he was believed to be dangerous. He was escorted back to the Canadian border crossing where there was a lone agent on duty. Since CBSA agents are barred from carrying firearms, the agent called Canada’s police agency, the RCMP, who arrived two hours later. Says the CBSA report:

U.S. Border Patrol officers were kind enough to stand by while our member dealt with this dangerous individual on the Canadian side and waited for the RCMP to arrive.

This kind screw up is reportedly typical at the U.S.-Canadian border and there is little American border patrols can do about it except grin and bear it.

UN Human Rights and Wrongs

President Bush couldn’t be more right that the United Nations needs reform. The best proof of the need for UN reform is the UN Commission on Human Rights.

There are 53 commission members. How can you take the UN seriously when six human-rights commission members are among the most repressive regimes in the world? These six regimes, according to a Freedom House survey, include: China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Instead of harrying U.S. ambassador-designate John Bolton, Congress should be harrying the United Nations for allowing such scandalous behavior. How can China, or Cuba, yes Cuba, be allowed membership on a UN commission responsible for monitoring and condemning human-rights violations? Why aren’t there congressional hearings about such immoral, duplicitous behavior at the United Nations?

The first question such a White House conference should ask is: How did China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Zimbabwe become members of a body called the United Nations Commission on Human Rights?

It’s bad enough to have these regimes in the UN, exercising voting privileges they would not dare allow their own peoples--but to have them sitting on the Commission on Human Rights? This is only one of the many macabre jokes about the United Nations: allowing felons to sit in judgment on themselves.

“Repressive governments enjoying CHR membership work in concert,” said Freedom House in its recently published survey,

 . . . and have successfully subverted the commission’s mandate. Rather than serving as the proper international forum for identifying and publicly censuring the world’s most egregious human rights violators, the CHR instead protects abusers, enabling them to sit in judgment of democratic states that honor and respect the rule of law.

A March 21 report by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan admitted the presence of these repressive governments on the CHR has severely injured the UN body’s credibility. Mr. Annan recommended creating a reformed “Human Rights Council” whose members would be chosen based on compliance with the “highest human-rights standards.” Three cheers for Kofi Annan--but who will start the ball rolling?

Forgotten is Article 3, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” and Article 18 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed on Dec. 10, 1948:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in pubic or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Those two clauses could well be the keynote of a White House Human Rights Conference to be convened, say, Dec. 10, 2005.     *

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.” –Paul Valery