Thursday, in yet another hypocritical decision, the members of the United Nations General Assembly elected the Venezuelan socialist dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro to the U.N. Human Rights Council. With 105 to 94 votes, Maduro’s regime topped Costa Rica, an exemplar of democracy in Latin America, to become a member of a council supposed to uphold human rights. This terrible decision not only shows the uselessness of the U.N. Human Rights Council but also that the United States was justified in leaving this organization last year. The world must stop rewarding dictators on the international stage. And to this end, America should lead once again and encourage the democratic countries of the world to leave and withdraw their funding from the council as well.
The Human Rights Council is currently composed of 47 nations, of which at least 20 are dictatorships or have questionable human rights records. Countries such as Angola, a 40-year old communist dictatorship, as well as China and Cuba, accuse the U.S. and Israel of violating human rights while not saying a word about the actual human rights violations in their own nations. Not only do they protect themselves, but they also shield human rights violators around the globe, such as Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran.
By electing Venezuela to the Human Rights Council, the Trump administration was proven right once again that this is a self-serving, hypocritical organization that isn’t worth U.S. recognition or participation.
The regime of Nicolas Maduro rigs elections to stay in power, jails and kills dissidents, and starves its people with its socialist policies. Worse, the U.N. itself has recognized this in the latest report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights where it stated that “thousands of people, mainly young men, have been killed in alleged confrontations with state forces” and that “as the economic crisis deepened, the authorities began using social programs in a discriminatory manner, based on political grounds, and as an instrument of social control.”
How can the U.N. allow a government that it recognizes as a human-rights violator to even be nominated for a seat in the most important human rights organization on the planet?
It’s ironic but not surprising that last year when then-U.S. Representative to the U.N. Nikki Haley and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the decision to pull out of the Human Rights Council for being a “cesspool of political bias,” the media and scholars criticized this decision. They argued that America wouldn’t achieve anything by pulling out of the Human Rights Council and that they did it to avoid criticism for the Trump administration’s supposed “offenses” to human rights. Others like the Carnegie Endowment went further and said the decision “would have a steep cost to America.”
While pulling out of the council might seem a useless endeavor, it had important financial benefits to Americans and human rights advocates. The Human Rights Council has a $200+ million annual budget financed by its members. American taxpayers shouldn’t have to finance the pompous meetings, ridiculous accusations of foreign dictators against America, or the protection of those dictators from international accountability.
But more can be done to stop the (anti-)Human Rights Council from furthering the agendas of dictators. America should build a coalition of democratic countries in the U.N. General Assembly so dictatorships can’t obtain enough votes to join the council anymore.
The U.S. should also encourage democracy-loving countries to both pull out of the council and stop their funding. Exemplary democracies that uphold human rights, such as Denmark and the United Kingdom, are the main funders of the council’s activities. The least the U.S. could do is call on them to stop aiding and legitimizing the regimes of Nicolas Maduro, Raul Castro, and Xi Jinping, to name a few.
Admittedly, this won’t be an easy task, since barely more than half of all countries are democracies. But most of the time, doing what is right isn’t easy. It is time the world actually speaks up for human rights, and not the rights of dictators.
Daniel Di Martino (@DanielDiMartino) is a Venezuelan expatriate, spokesman of the Venezuelan political party Vente Venezuela, and contributor to Young Voices.
