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After listening to the 4th annual report of  Ms Sheila Keetharuth, the UN Human Rights Rapporteur for Eritrea on Wednesday, 14 June,  majority of country delegations and civil  society advocacies to the  35th Session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva expressed  in their statements deep frustration over the unchanged human rights situation in Eritrea, many a speaker asked what is to be done about it. The quick  and sharp response of the Mauritian lawyer, Keetharuth, was: respecting "the supremacy of human rights" and not  treating human rights as "bargaining chips" in a way of appeasing with perpetrators of heinous crimes against their own people.

Ms Keetharuth told the Council that arbitrary arrests, disappearances, torture, death and the long list of abuses stated in the UN Commission of Inquiry's report on Eritrea a year ago are still continuing and that the Eritrean authorities did not show the slightest interest  or intention to change the situation by implementing at least some of the UN  recommendations to it or the pledges it made at the Universal Periodic Reviews to the UN body.

For UN expert, it is "no business as usual" on human rights in Eritrea where all calls for improvement of the situation have been ignored for too long. Yet, she did not stop making additional recommendations to the Eritrean regime while knowing well that her recommendations, old and new, will remain unimplemented.

Ms Keetharuth's call to western democracies to kindly respect "the supremacy of human rights" in Eritrea was further qualified by her recommendation that it is time to forcefully build the capacity of Eritrean civil society movements in the diaspora.

Over 80% of the 30 speakers who made interventions at the meeting on Eritrea spoke against the excesses of the repressive regime in Asmara and appeared to be willing to extend the mandate the UN rapporteur for Eritrea. The 35th Session of the UN HR Council, which opened on 6 June, is due to end by 23rd June.