SSecretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Monday morning that President Biden had instructed the Department of State to rejoin the UN Human Rights Council. This decision gives preference to the PR strategy of the administration over concrete diplomatic results.
The case for ‘re-involvement’ with the council is based on a misrepresentation of the American Trump era in Geneva, and it maintains the deeply damaging story that says how flawed the Human Rights Council is, it is not worth the boat to shake to demand change. .
The Trump administration withdrew from the council in June 2018, citing structural problems it prejudices against Israel and the continued participation of human rights violators. Although it has sometimes done valuable work on Syria, North Korea and a few other hotspots for human rights, the council is too often hijacked by its many authoritarian members. “Such a council is actually damaging the human rights issue,” former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said when announcing our departure.
To prove her right, Russia, China and Cuba all won their council seats last year, and the body adopted five resolutions that are critical of Israel and no criticism of its latest members that violate human rights. Their hold on the council is so deeply entrenched that some of the UN’s special rapporteur positions that it was created have only validated harmful authoritarian points of discussion.
Biden’s government is not entirely unaware of the problems Blinken calls this ‘flawed body, in need of reform’; rather, it says that re-involvement is the best way to prevent authoritarian regimes from using it to their advantage. But Biden officials still wear rose-tinted glasses, confident that their slogans on human rights and multilateral involvement will be enough to bring about positive improvement.
Blinken notes that America ‘will act as an observer with the Council’, as if it were a significant change in policy. But it is not. Not only is there such a thing as observer status, but the previous government also continued to engage in council-related activities in such a capacity, even after terminating its membership. It has played a role in the ‘universal periodic review’ of countries’ human rights reports during 2019 and 2020, and it has organized meetings around Geneva on human rights violations in Venezuela and China’s Uyghur concentration camps.
In fact, until the U.S. officially wants to sit on the board, the only real change is that Biden is ordering U.S. diplomats to attend some board meetings. In general, however, the Biden government is only loudly declaring that it will do what the previous team did more quietly – a message that reassures European diplomats and human rights NGOs.
Which leads to another fallacy advocated by the story of the Biden administration: European diplomats and NGO staff, rather than the withdrawal in 2018, posed one of the most stubborn obstacles to meaningful council reform.
When the Trump administration took office in 2017, a formal reform process would begin as early as 2021, but officials refused to accept another four years of the status quo. And so the government – in the hope that it could succeed where the Obama administration failed – launched an aggressive campaign to change the council which had about 200 meetings with diplomats and human rights advocates throughout 2017 and early 2018 . Diplomats first made fundamental changes to the council’s anti-Israel agenda and its lax membership criteria, but when it became clear that it was politically unworkable, they expressed their willingness to adopt less ambitious measures that would change day-to-day operations.
U.S. diplomats are still blocked at every turn. The European delegations killed a modest package that would simplify the council’s agenda and dilute the debate over its numerous anti-Israel resolutions. The NGOs rejected a reform proposal that would turn their annual candidate forum for the Human Rights Council into an event hosted directly by the UN (the groups, of course, objected to a selfish desire to hold these events themselves).
If there is any doubt about the weak link when it comes to standing up for human rights violators at the Human Rights Council: Before Washington even decided to leave the body, the Chinese delegation won a resolution calling for a “mutually beneficial cooperation” “support. ”And other Chinese Communist Party-approved language on human rights in March 2018. Only the US voted against the measure. The European countries, which were afraid to oppose Beijing, remembered them.
But after Washington left, the other democracies learned to take care of themselves, and when China proposed a resolution with a similar language last year, most voted against it.
The Biden team should have tried to take advantage of the new transparency of these American allies to first seek the reform of the council before re-entering. The US delegation could have worked peacefully with the other democracies ahead of the March session of the Council – which will begin the reform process in 2021 – which will provide the condition for their support for reforms.
Instead, the new administration opted for the flashy option that promoted its “Diplomacy is Back” narrative, and probably got none of the content.