F.U. to the U.N.

The assault on Brazilian youth delegates at the World Urban Forum on Wednesday is still aggravating this page. While I used the assault as an opportunity to post the antidemocratic rap sheet of the NPA (City Hall sponsored the Forum), that outburst masks a greater outrage.

Until the assault, the public did not know that security for the World Urban Forum was the exclusive jurisdiction of the United Nations, and was administered by security officers from New York and Nairobi, Kenya. According to UN spokesman Sharad Shankardass, the Vancouver Convention Centre is technically not part of Canada for the duration of the World Urban Forum.

This abrogation of soverignty and the Charter of Rights of Freedoms without notice is outrageous, immoral, disgusting, reprehensible, evil, terrifying, stupid...and WRONG. For an organization allegedly committed to preventing war, UN staff assaulting young people for bringing T-shirts with that very message equates to Kofi Anan wiping his ass with the UN Charter. Whoever among the government organizers who felt it was O.K. for a week-long UN dictatorship to overlook Coal Harbour should apologize and resign.

With the 2010 Olympics less than four years away, Vancouverites and the people who govern us need to take a good, hard look at ourselves and our shared values of free speech and democratic tolerance. These values do not exist in abrogated multinational "security zones", and the first, best thing City Council could do would be to ban security zones. Either the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee and other international organziations either agree to conduct their business in Vancouver according to Canadian law, or they can take their business elsewhere.