Nicholas Farrell Nicholas Farrell

The UN’s politically motivated search for human rights abuses in Italy

When politicians in Europe listen to the people and actually do something to stop uncontrolled immigration, the Holy See of the Global Crusade to Abolish Countries and the White Working Class – a.k.a the United Nations – sends in the thought police.

This spring it happened in Britain when Tendayi Achiume, UN ‘Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance’, turned up to do a fortnight’s fieldwork in order to demonstrate what she had already decided: Britain, thanks to Brexit, is a human-rights emergency in the grip of surging racism.

The war for the West is a war of words and such UN rapporteurs have a small but key role in providing the media with the words required for the constant flow of headlines necessary to win the war.

Now it is the turn of Italy, whose new populist coalition government of the radical right Lega and alt-left Five Star Movement, which is hostile to the European Union and to illegal migrants, has seen support soar to 60pc in the polls since the March general election.

Clearly – as only now we begin to see – the UN let Britain off the hook quite lightly back in April with just the one Special Rapporteur, even if she is a law professor at the University of California whose published works include ‘Migration as Decolonization.’

I realise this because on Monday, the UN’s new High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, said in her maiden speech to the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva that she is going to send an entire posse of rapporteurs to Italy to investigate this new global hot-spot of migrant human rights abuses caused by those awful populists.

In Italy’s general election, the Lega got 17pc compared to the Five Star Movement’s 32pc. Both, in particular the Lega, promised to stop illegal migrants masquerading as refugees from getting into Italy across the Mediterranean and to deport the 500,000 already there.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in