Electing Venezuela to its Human Rights Council, the United Nations hammered another nail into its credibility coffin on Thursday.
Winning a plurality of General Assembly votes, dictator Nicolás Maduro’s cronies received scattered applause. That applause reflects deeply on the organization from which it arrives. Maduro’s victory proves that the United Nations is fundamentally broken. Under his authoritarianism, Venezuela’s child mortality rate has skyrocketed and medicines have disappeared. Instead of exporting oil, of which it has the greatest proven reserves of any nation on Earth, Venezuela now turns its professionals into prostitutes and expels them to Colombia.
Even for the asylum that is the United Nations Human Rights Council, Venezuela’s participation should be a nonstarter.
But it gets worse.
After all, near simultaneously with Maduro’s victory, the United Nations’ Twitter feed was proclaiming its struggle against child poverty.
Every child has a right to grow up free from poverty.
More on Thursday’s #EndPoverty Day: https://t.co/bFlp10YD11 pic.twitter.com/tAr9Q7Jxuz
— United Nations (@UN) October 17, 2019
You can’t make this stuff up. But what you can say is that this decision proves a broader reality. The United Nations is broken. America should continue withholding funding until the organization agrees to fix itself with serious and systemic reform.
