Below is an article published by UN Watch:

UN Watch condemned today's [10 December 2012] election of Mauritania, a country that allows 800,000 of its citizens to live as slaves, as Vice-President of the UN Human Rights Council.

The UN Human Rights Council met today [10 December 2012] in Geneva and elected Mauritania as its Vice-President and Rapporteur for the next year, the second highest position at the world's top human rights body.

"It is obscene for the U.N. to use the occasion of Human Rights Day, when we commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to elect the world's worst enabler of slavery to this prestigious post," said Hillel Neuer, UN Watch executive director.

"The U.N. is making an arsonist head of the fire department. It defies both morality and common sense."

According to a recent report by the Guardian, "up to 800,000 people in a nation of 3.5 million remain chattels," with power and wealth overwhelmingly concentrated among lighter-skinned Moors, "leaving slave-descended darker-skinned Moors and black Africans on the edges of society."

In today's session, Poland was elected president, while Ecuador, Maldives, and Switzerland were also elected as vice-presidents.

Neuer also objected to Ecuador's election, citing its "notorious record of censoring independent journalists and shutting down newspapers."

UN Watch expressed regret that while the dictatorship of Belarus took the floor in today's meeting to criticize the election of Poland, none of the democracies said a word about the election of Mauritania or Ecuador.