Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will address the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva this week. Given the proliferation of human rights violations around the world and the failures of the UNHRC, I applaud Haley’s eagerness to hold the council accountable.
In advance of her trip, let’s step back and examine why human rights should play a prominent role in our foreign policy.
The Declaration of Independence declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
While we know that our nation has spent much of our history trying to narrow the gap between these self-evident truths and our daily reality, it is noteworthy that our founders used the phrase “all men.” Today, we would say all men and women, but the point is that our founders did not suggest these unalienable rights were limited only to Americans.
If we accept the fact that these rights are not reserved for Americans alone but are instead universal, then we have an obligation to ensure these universal human rights inform not only our domestic policy but our foreign policy as well.
Promoting and protecting human rights internationally is not just a matter of principle or morality — doing so also serves our national security interests.
As Haley emphasized in her U.N. Security Council remarks on April 18, “the protection of human rights is often deeply intertwined with peace and security.” As she observed, human rights violations can often serve as “the trigger for conflict.”
As an example, Haley mentioned that the horrible Syrian conflict—which has generated so many threats to United States national security, not to mention heart-wrenching human suffering—started when the Assad regime failed to respect the universal human rights of a group of young boys opposed to the regime.
So, both our principles and our interests, our values and our security, are advanced when the promotion of universal human rights figures prominently, not peripherally, in U.S. foreign policy.
It is both wrong and short-sighted to believe that we can better protect our national security interests by ignoring or sidelining human rights.
Perhaps that is why the United Nations Charter, that our country played a pivotal role in establishing, states clearly in Article One that one of the four purposes of the United Nations is to promote and encourage “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.”
U.S. national security interests are best served when the United Nations effectively fulfills this core purpose.
For that reason, we want the UNHRC to effectively fulfill its responsibility of “promoting universal respect for the protection of all human rights and fundamental freedoms for all.”
That’s why, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee that oversees the U.N., I convened a hearing on May 25 assessing the UNHRC.
As the testimony of the witnesses clearly underscored, the UNHRC has too often failed to promote its important mission. The witnesses echoed the sentiments of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Erin Barclay who said in Geneva in March: “Regrettably, too many of the actions of this Council do not support those universal principles. Indeed, they contradict them.”
Unfortunately, this should not come as a surprise.
Consider the fact that some of the world’s worst human rights abusers are on the UNHRC. China and Cuba are members, yet according to Freedom House, they have the worst or second-to-worst rankings possible for political rights and civil liberties.
Additionally, the UNHRC has exhibited a systematic, reflexive, and shameful bias against Israel—our closest and most reliable ally in the Middle East. Israel is the only country in the world that is subjected to being a permanent agenda item at the UNHRC.
When countries with the worst possible human rights records sit on the UNHRC seek to deflect attention from their own egregious human rights abuses and attempt to pass judgment on Israel—a country with a vibrant liberal democracy—the credibility of the UNHRC is further undermined and the United States must not be silent.
America is at its best when it models and promotes respect for universal human rights. We should expect the same from the UNHRC and its members. I look forward to Ambassador Haley taking this message to Geneva this week.
Sen. Todd Young (@SenToddYoung) is the junior U.S. senator from Indiana.
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