President Biden is wrong to return America to the United Nations Human Rights Council. While the United States is returning as yet only as an observer, this is probably just a first step toward full membership.
The cardinal fact about the council is that it is an utterly disreputable organization, to the point of being farcical, and serves human rights no better than a nuclear weapon detonation serves human health. Led by China, Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela, the council exists only to give cover to the grotesque human rights records of its despotic members. That, and relentlessly to attack the credibility, rights, and conduct of democracies, most notably America and Israel.
If the president truly believes that multilateralism is good for America, he should support reforms. Rejoining the Human Rights Council would confirm suspicion that Biden’s fervent multilateralism is a shallow thing and requires no more and no less than doing whatever will make America’s European allies happy. Put another way, it’s the act of a weak and insecure administration that craves nothing so much as the admiration of foreigners.
This deference to the wrong totems goes beyond the U.N.
Take the International Criminal Court’s new assertion that it has extrajudicial authority over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The ICC isn’t actually concerned about bringing justice, such as to Palestinians thrown from buildings by Hamas or the tens of thousands of subjected to extortion by the terrorist group every day. This is yet another attack on Israel for trumped-up “war crimes.”
The court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, who has described America as embracing an “aggressive policy of antagonism,” is responsible both for the court’s new anti-Israel antics and its unlawful investigation of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. This is not an objective or even a fair prosecutor, which the Trump administration recognized when it sanctioned her.
Bensouda has her own Bermuda Triangle, a place where her moral and prosecutorial compass simply doesn’t work. It starts to malfunction as soon as the subject arises of China’s genocide against the Uighur peoples of Xinjiang province.
Bensouda turns a blind eye to the most egregious breaches of international humanitarian law anywhere on Earth and disregards her own precedent to do so. This was exposed in December, when Bensouda sought to explain her decision not to exert ICC authority over China’s abuses of Uighurs. She had claimed in an earlier ruling that the ICC had the authority to investigate Myanmar’s mistreatment of its Rohingya ethnic minority, even though Myanmar is not an ICC signatory. This is because, she asserted, elements of Myanmar’s criminality occurred in the form of Rohingya refugees on Bangladeshi soil. Because Bangladesh is an ICC signatory, a legal cause of action against Myanmar could be established.
But in December, she responded to a legal petition by Uighurs extirpated from Tajikistan to China. The filers sought to hold Bensouda to her own precedent, and they should have succeeded, but Bensouda claimed that there was insufficient evidence to investigate China.
She is a fraud and a liar. More than 2 million innocent Uighurs have been imprisoned, forcibly sterilized, used as slave labor, sold for rape, murdered, and had their identity systematically shredded. Bensouda refuses to see any of this. In contrast, facing democracies, Bensouda rushes to the ramparts.
The Biden administration should not tolerate such outrageous absurdity from the ICC and the U.N. Human Rights Council. To do so undermines the credibility of serious multilateral ventures and reinforces the idea that America is the dupe of international institutions.
If Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are serious about making the world a better place for Americans and everyone else, they should recognize the imperative of reform. They should clarify that unless the ICC changes tack and the U.N. Human Rights Council accepts reform, they will take coercive action to affect that reform.
If nothing else, they should not rush to rejoin such obviously flawed institutions.
