Volker Türk report, toxic West, UK-Canada resolution, Israel's North-East connection

SRI Lanka faces the Report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR), and the Resolution expected to be submitted by the UK and Canada at the September session of the UN Human Rights Council, in a specific global and historical context. That context is the confusion, fissure, irrationality and extremism in the West, and the resultant toxicity of the West.

- By Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

Most of the Human Rights initiatives, strictures and suggestions we face are from a West which is not merely divided but is showing increasing irrationality in different parts of the world and on different issues, displaying a deterioration in perception of and perspective on world events.

It is best evidenced in the schism on two major issues: (a) Russia/Ukraine and (b) Israel/Palestine. The USA or at least the Trump administration is rational on the former and irrational on the latter. The Rest of the West - UK, EU, Canada--is irrational on the former and rational on the latter.

In terms of political thought/theory and world outlook, the problem is that in the post-Cold War world, Liberalism and Realism have pulled apart or been pulled apart as paradigms.

Toxic West, UK-Canada resolution

The most significant thing about Alaska was not that it discussed Ukraine but that it was a bilateral summit between the world's two nuclear superpowers at a time when the painstakingly negotiated framework of nuclear arms agreements has been dismantled, chiefly by the US Republican administration of George W Bush.

When there's a conventional war in Ukraine with Russia and the UK-EU-NATO on opposite sides, it is vital for peace in Europe and the world that there be at least the beginning of restoration of normalcy between the two nuclear superpowers, USA and Russia. But this is far from self-evident in today's West, including among US liberal-democrats.

The UK and EU viewed the entire process of the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska exclusively through the prism of the Ukraine war. The continental/regional issue (Ukraine) is seen as greater than repairing the global architecture or even the resumption of dialogue between nuclear superpowers.

The UK-EU argument hypocritically leaves out NATO's military devastation that ended an entire country, a state, in Europe, namely Yugoslavia in 1999.