President Biden’s obsession with quickly reversing his predecessor’s policy led him to do something he constantly accused his predecessor of: giving legitimacy to murder dictators.
Foreign Minister Antony Blinken announced this week that Washington will “immediately and strongly commit” to the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018. U.S. representatives will seek full membership of the council’s election in October.
The New York Times calls the UNHRC ‘the world’s most important human rights body’, but ‘the world’s most corrupt human rights body’ would be more appropriate. Its 47 members include serious human rights violators, and they use their position to relieve their citizens and the world of their wrongdoing – and even get opportunities to condemn Western democracies as the real abusers.
Why would America want to work with an organization that is seemingly dedicated to improving human rights but dominated by people like China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela?
Blinken agrees that the body is “flawed and in need of reform,” but he claims that the “shortcomings” of America are required “at the table, with the full weight of our diplomatic leadership.” He says the council can ‘serve as an important forum for those who fight injustice and tyranny’, that is to say ‘when it works well’.
But when did it? ever worked well?
Trump’s withdrawal was not a norm-turning step by an unprecedented president. When the council was created in 2006 to replace the UN Human Rights Commission, President George W. Bush did not want to join, and he was ahead: the new body liquidated to repeat the same problems that led to the dismantling of the old, which is a ‘club of abusers’, as NPR put it.
However, President Barack Obama has decided to ‘re-engage’ because it is ‘essential’ to ‘sit at the table’, said John Kerry, his Secretary of State. Does this sound familiar? But there is no evidence of reform during the Obama years.
Take UNHRC’s obsession with condemning Israel, even ignoring deadly dictatorships. The only permanent agenda item of the body is indeed Israel, and he has made more decisions to censor the Jewish state than for the rest of the world combined. It also created eight commissions of inquiry into Israel – and only one into North Korea.
The then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stated during the opening session of the council in 2011 that his “structural prejudice against Israel” was “wrong” and that it “undermined” his work. But if the council ignores similar complaints from two UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, and its own president, Doru Costea – and does so – why would it change 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, calling it “shameful and outrageous”, has demanded that Falk resign. He served his six-year term, which ended in 2014.
There is simply no reform of a body that evokes evildoers equal to free nations. The UN resolution to establish the council states that members ‘must maintain the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights’ – but more than half are not even democracies, according to Freedom House as ‘not free’ or ‘partially free’.
While the United States had a seat at the table, Faisal bin Hassan Trad, Saudi Arabia, was elected chairman of the council’s advisory committee. It was in 2015, the same year that Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, greeted with standing ovations, delivered a 40-minute speech full of lies, with answers that were not allowed.
When 22 countries signed a letter to the council in 2019 demanding that China close its Xinjiang concentration camps, where at least one million Uyghurs were interned, 50 countries responded by Beijing’s ‘remarkable achievements in Xinjiang’. to compliment government.
The reciprocal setback among tyrants is perhaps not even the most tragicomic council activity. Last month, North Korea – led by a totalitarian dynasty for decades – gave the word to Australia to “stop cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in public places of detention” and “ensure” that disabled people persons may participate ‘in elections on an equal basis with others. ”
Why does America give an imprimatur to a body that makes a mockery of freedom? It’s as ridiculous as Biden’s reversal of Trump’s terrorist designation of Yemen’s Iran – backed Houthi rebels days before he asked them. . . stop their terrorism. An anti-Trump-centered foreign policy is not a real policy at all.
Twitter: @KJTorrance