Claudia Rosett speaks not as a survivor or a fighter on the front lines, but as a reporter and a witness. In a world with many institutions that propose to safeguard human rights—from the United Nations, to regional organizations, to more localized NGOs—it can be difficult to decide who to trust.

About

Claudia Rosett is a seasoned American journalist and editor who specializes in international affairs. For over 27 years, she has reported from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union and has covered such landmark stories as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the existence of North Korean labor camps in the Russian Far East in 1994. Since 2002, Rosett has exposed the UN Oil-for-Food scandal, the largest financial fraud in history. She has contributed to a wide range of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and USA Today. In 2005, she was awarded the Mightier Pen and Eric Breindel Journalism awards. Rosett writes a weekly column on foreign policy for Forbes.com and is a journalist-in-residence at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

In her presentation at the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, Rosett reminds us that one of the tasks of watchdog organizations is to seek out the truth and amplify for to the world, because the most powerful tool used by oppressive regimes is "the big lie"—claiming that atrocities are justified, or that they never took place at all. Sometimes the world believes "the big lie", and when this occurs at the fault of a major recognizable organization, the consequences can be more damaging than the offences themselves. The biggest organization at risk of this is the United Nations, which, Rosett reminds us, was set up with Stalin's Soviet Union as a founding member. Many member states have a deep interest in warping the meaning of human rights, and there is very little transparency or accountability. When former General Secretary Kofi Annan received the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the U.N. in 2001, he did so after the Oil and Food program scandal and numerous genocides that took place under his watch. Today, there are still just as many double standards—Libya presides over the General Assembly, and the biggest U.N. voting block is chaired by Yemen (last year by Sudan). In 2009, Iran, while under U.N. sanctions for nuclear weapons, chaired the U.N. Development Program, and still holds a position in many other U.N. activities. The current U.N. Human Rights Council, which was inaugurated under a brand new $23 million ceiling, includes Russia, China, Cuba, Cameroon, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. In the face of these hypocrisies, Rosett urges us to trust our instincts. Do not accept information blindly just because it comes from recognizable names in the human rights community, she says. Observe, document, demand the truth, and remind the watchmen and the world that freedom is a universal right.