President Biden’s obsession with quickly reversing his predecessor’s policies has led him to do something he constantly accused his predecessor of: giving legitimacy to murderous dictators.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced this week that Washington will “join immediately and forcefully” to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018. US representatives will seek full membership in the October council elections.
The New York Times calls the UNHRC “the most important human rights body in the world,” but “the most corrupt human rights body in the world” would be more appropriate. Its 47 members include blatant human rights violators, and they use their point of view to inform their citizens and the world about their crimes – and even have the opportunity to condemn Western democracies as the real abusers.
Why would America want to work with an organization ostensibly committed to improving human rights, but dominated by China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela?
Blinken agrees that the body is “flawed and in need of reform,” but argues that to address the “shortcomings” America “needs to sit at the table, using the full weight of our diplomatic leadership.” He says the council “can serve as an important forum for those fighting injustice and tyranny” – that is, “if it works well.”
But when did it ever good job?
Trump’s withdrawal was not a step towards overturning the norm of an unprecedented president. When the council was formed in 2006 to replace the UN Human Rights Commission, President George W. Bush refused to join and he was prescient: the new body eventually repeated the same problems that led to the dismantling of the old one, which was a “club of abusers”, as NPR put it.
However, President Barack Obama decided to “re-enroll” because it is “essential” to “sit at the table,” said John Kerry, his Secretary of State. Sounds familiar? But there is no evidence of reform during the Obama years.
Take the UNHRC’s obsession with condemning Israel, even though it ignores deadly dictatorships. Indeed, the body’s only permanent agenda item is Israel, and it has passed more resolutions criticizing the Jewish state than the rest of the world put together. It has also created eight committees of inquiry in Israel – and only one in North Korea.
Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated at the inaugural session of the council in 2011 that his “structural bias against Israel” is “wrong” and “undermines” his work. But if the council ignored similar complaints from two UN secretaries-general, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, and its own president, Doru Costea – and he did – why would it change for Clinton?
Later that year, Richard Falk, the council’s special rapporteur on “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, posted an anti-Semitic cartoon on his blog. The United States called it “disgraceful and outrageous” and demanded that Falk step down. He served his six-year term, which ended in 2014.
There is simply no reform of a body that puts evildoers on an equal footing with free nations. The UN resolution establishing the council states that members will “maintain the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights” – but more than half are not even democracies, which Freedom House assesses as “not free” or ” partially free “.
While the United States sat at their table, Faisal bin Hassan Trad of Saudi Arabia was elected chairman of the council’s advisory committee. That was in 2015, the same year that Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, greeted with a standing ovation, delivered a 40-minute speech full of lies, with no answers allowed.
In 2019, when 22 countries signed a letter to the council demanding that China close its Xinjiang concentration camps, where at least one million Uyghurs have been interned, 50 countries responded by complimenting the “remarkable achievements of the regime in Xinjiang.”
Mutual backlapping between tyrants may not even be the most tragicomic of council activity. Last month, North Korea – ruled for decades by a totalitarian dynasty – was given the floor to tell Australia to “end cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in public detention centers” and “ensure” that disabled people can participate “in elections on an equal basis. base with others. “
Why give America’s imprimatur to a body that ridicules freedom? It’s as laughable as Biden’s reversal of Trump’s terrorist designation of Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels days before they asked. . . stop their terrorism. A foreign policy against Trump is not a real policy at all.
Twitter: @KJTorrance