The United Nations has given up any pretense of caring about human rights, opting instead to just troll the United States as payback for the Trump administration’s more aggressive approach to the body.
Liz Throssell, the spokeswoman for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, decided that Portland is facing a more egregious human rights situation than Xinjiang. She warned that federal law enforcement tactics in Portland “may give rise to arbitrary detention and other human rights violations.”
This is the same U.N. office that a whistleblower claims has been providing the Chinese government the names of Chinese dissidents, including Tibetan and Uighur dissidents, who were scheduled to testify against the regime in front of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Not that a whistleblower is even needed to know the U.N. will let China get away with doing whatever it wants.
The state of Oregon has already raised the concern of overreaching federal officers. A U.S. district judge ruled that “the State has presented just one example of an arrest without probable cause and one example of an unreasonable seizure.” The situation in Portland has thus far been less dangerous for the rioters in the streets than it has been for the officers on the wrong end of fireworks attacks, “mortars,” and blinding lasers.
The Trump administration has used a heavier hand in dealing with the U.N., and deservedly so. The U.N. has been groveling to authoritarians and playing global progressive politics for some time now. It also knows it can take shots at the U.S. so long as it’s seen as blaming Donald Trump, as the Democratic Party is still supportive of the U.N.
In 2019, the U.S. “owed” $674 million in dues to the U.N. At this point, all those dues are paying for is for us to be lectured by the same organization that coddles the Chinese government and the rest of the world’s worst human rights abusers. That’s quite a bargain.
We would be better off lighting that money on fire than giving it to the U.N. Global human rights would be better served if the U.N. headquarters in New York City had its doors closed for good. There’s no point in paying hundreds of millions of dollars to have useless bureaucrats from around the world come to our country and single us out for imaginary human rights abuses.
