On Tuesday, the administration made official what it had threatened to do for months. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The timing is not ideal. Only the day before, the Council’s High Commissioner criticized the Trump administration for its policy of separating people from their children when caught illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Whatever one thinks of the administration’s plan to deter illegal immigration, it is an ongoing public-relations debacle that will allow transnational elite and their allies in the media accuse the U.S. administration of hypocrisy and worse.
Still—and leaving aside the border controversy—the argument for withdrawal is persuasive.
The move is not unprecedented. The Council’s forerunner, the Human Rights Commission, was disbanded in 2006 by Kofi Annan, then U.N. general secretary, on the grounds that it had become a laughingstock. The Commission consisted, as the Council does now, of many nations that flagrantly and persistently abused human rights. When the Council was formed in 2006, the George W. Bush administration boycotted it. Not until the Obama administration did the U.S. opt to rejoin.
The most obvious problem with the Council is the same as it was 12 years ago: A sizable proportion of the body’s 47 member states are well known abusers of human rights: Venezuela, Russia, Pakistan, Cuba, Afghanistan, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi are all members.
A less obvious but more insidious problem is the Council’s persistent anti-Semitism. We are prepared to acknowledge the value of remaining engaged in transnational institutions even when those institutions exhibit a low regard for humane values and democratic norms. But the U.N. Human Rights Council is obsessed with condemning the state of Israel. In the decade after its founding in 2006, as Hillel Neuer pointed out on Tuesday, the Council condemned Israel 68 times. It condemned North Korea only 9 times, Iran 6 times, Sudan only 3 times. Venezuela, Zimbabwe, China, Turkey, Somalia, Russia, Pakistan—not at all. Even granting some of the international Left’s criticisms of Israel, what sort of organization feels that Israel—a government that grants civil rights and parliamentary representation to its Arab citizens—is seven times worse than a nation that systematically murders and imprisons anybody even suspected of harboring dissident thoughts?
That the Human Rights Council is beyond hope of renewal was powerfully confirmed, though inadvertently, by former U.N. ambassador Samantha Power. After the Pompeo-Haley announcement, Power conceded that the Council is biased against Israel. But, she said, “tough & effective diplomacy wld use US influence to change this. Before we rejoined in 2009, more than half of all country-specific HRC resolutions focused on Israel. By 2016, we had cut those in half.”
Golly! Team Obama managed to persuade anti-Semitic cranks at the U.N. to issue official rants about their favorite topic only half as much as they did before. A victory for human rights!
The Council is irredeemable. It’s obsessed with a racist lie. Better to withdraw now than to go on pretending that that lie is somehow acceptable as long as it’s expressed less often.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the council was formed in 2009. It was formed in 2006.
