NEW YORK, March 25, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In the latest press-release from this years United Nations Human Rights Commission sessions, readers are again invited to be astonished by UN doublespeak.
Tuesday’s LifeSiteNews.com report revealed that in a session on homosexual marriage, defenders of traditional marriage warned that polygamy would follow directly from homosexual marriage. The argument was given credibility as the world body admitted that, in addition to tacit recognition of homosexual marriage with the allowance of homosexual benefits, the UN also accepted polygamy. Sandra Haji-Ahmed, Officer-in-Charge of the Office of United Nations Human Resources Management, told Committee members, “Polygamous marriages are not questioned by the Organization when they were valid under the national laws of Member States. The Organization makes no value judgment on that type of marriage—it accepted it as a fact.” She explained that UN staff who were polygamous could have all their spouses receive benefits. A Tuesday press release from a session reviewing the Ugandan report to the UN HRC claimed, however, that “Reducing a woman to a state of polygamy was inadmissible; it was an attack on the dignity of women and offended all human individuals.” The comments were from Tunisian Abdelfattah Amor, Chairman of the Human Rights Committee.
The Tuesday meeting was aimed at scrutinizing Uganda’s initial report on compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
Also, as part of Tuesday’s session, Chairman of the Uganda Law Reform Commission, Joseph Kakooza, responded to criticism from Egypt’s Ahmed Tawfik Khalil, who expressed concern about forced and early marriages in Uganda. Kakooza said that, although the legal age for consensual sexual relations was 18, Islamic marriages of under-age girls were allowed by the Constitution. It is customary that girls as young as 14 marry, he said, but that “the Commission was conducting education and advocacy programs to persuade Muslims that early marriages could endanger the life of the wife and contribute to population explosion.” See the UN press release on the meeting: https://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2004/hrct651.doc.htm See LifeSiteNews.com’s related coverage of the first meeting, “Homosexual Activism Pits Third World and Vatican against UN Secretariat, Canada and EU” at: https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2004/mar/04031603.html