There’s only one place on earth where it might make sense that “multilateral disarmament negotiating forum” should be led by a country that launches chemical weapons attacks on a fairly routine basis. That place is of course the United Nations. On Monday, May 27, Syria—the regime headed by Bashar al-Assad—took the presidency of the U.N.’s Conference on Disarmament.
Robert Wood, the United States ambassador to the 65-member Conference on Disarmament, walked out of the plenary session in which Syria’s rotational appointment was announced. “Syria’s presence here is a travesty,” he said later. The Syrian regime “has committed countless crimes against its own people through the use of chemical weapons, and it is just unacceptable for them to be leading this body.”
Since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011, U.N. investigators have recorded no fewer than 34 instances of the regime using—not possessing but using—chemical weapons. It is, by a long stretch, the single greatest offender of the U.N.’s proscription on chemical weapons.
As Hillel Neuer, the executive director of U.N. Watch, points out to us, Syria’s elevation to the presidency of the Conference generated praise from Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and North Korea—a dark panoply of the world’s most aggressive supporters of terrorism. (The U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany, among a few others, issued condemnations.)
This is hardly the first time a rogue nation has presided over the U.N. body it was least fitted to head. We think, for instance, of Libya’s election to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission in 2003. Libya may have much to recommend it as a nation and culture, but it was not then and is not now a respecter of human rights.
The problem therefore isn’t that the U.N. happens to be behaving badly at present. The problem is intrinsic to the organization. Outside the five permanent members of the Security Council, the U.N.’s member states are given parity with each other. Burundi and Mauritius have the same status as Poland and Japan. The smaller nations, and especially the criminal ones, routinely use that parity to elevate themselves and cast aspersions on those they perceive to be their enemies—typically the United States and Israel. That parity, together with procedural rules that place member states in positions of influence based on their names’ alphabetical order rather than merit or propriety, leads to risible results like this one.
What next? Should we expect Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines to become head of the U.N.’s commission on Drugs and Crime? Will Saudi Arabia take charge of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women? Maybe so—in April of 2017 the kingdom was elected to that very council.
The U.S. should vocally oppose the U.N.’s honoring of rogue states when it can. Ambassador Wood was right to do so. But U.S. condemnations mean little in a body whose members thrive on disparaging America, its allies, and its values.
