US Makes the Right Call to Quit UN Human Rights Council
Brett Schaefer
June 19, 2018

The United States is expected to announce Tuesday that it will leave the United Nations Human Rights Council.

This is hardly surprising. As Ambassador Nikki Haley explained in Geneva last year, the Human Rights Council remains beset by three fundamental problems.

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1. Bias against Israel.

According to UN Watch, the council had adopted 169 condemnatory resolutions on countries as of the end of May. Of those, nearly half (47 percent) focused on Israel. In addition, the council has convened 28 special sessions to address human rights violations or related emergencies. Of those 28 sessions, eight focused on Israel.

Moreover, Israel is the only country subject to a separate agenda item: Item 7, labeled, “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every other country is examined under Item 4, “Human rights situations that require the council’s attention.”

The council’s fixation on Israel is absurd. By spending exponentially more time on Israel than on North Korea or Syria, the council only underscores the politicization and bias of its agenda.

2. Human rights abusers sit on the council.

Governments deemed “not free” and “partly free” by Freedom House historically have comprised a majority of the council’s members. Not even the world’s most repressive regimes have been excluded.

Currently, 14 of the 47 members of the council (including Burundi, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela) are ranked “not free” by Freedom House. This is the highest number of “not free” countries in council history, indicating that the majority of the world’s governments see no problem with electing human rights violators to the UN’s highest human rights body.

Even defenders of the Human Rights Council acknowledge this problem. As Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, noted, “[T]he Trump administration is correct that [membership] is suboptimal… . To make matters worse, some abusive governments try to join the council in the hope of protecting themselves and their kind from condemnation.”

3. Consistent failure to address serious human rights situations equally and objectively.

In stark contrast to its obsessive focus on Israel, the council is notably incurious about the human rights situations in some of the world’s most oppressive counties.

For instance, the Human Rights Council has never passed a condemnatory resolution on China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or Zimbabwe, despite their terrible records of religious persecution, punishment of political dissent, hostility to freedom of the press, unequal rights for women, and use of force against civil society and government opponents, respectively.

One can also look at the Universal Periodic Review, a process under which every country undergoes a review of its human rights practices and receives recommendations for improvement. According to that UPR Info, the country that has received the most recommendations for improvement is the United States.

That’s right. The Human Rights Council’s process has concluded that the U.S. has more need of human rights advice than Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. Israel is also in the top 25, naturally, right ahead of China.

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https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/06/19/u...rights-council/

US Dumps UN Human Rights Council
June 19, 2018
Daniel Greenfield

Even more than the rest of the UN, the Human Rights Council always seemed like a garish joke.

Take the world's worst human rights abusers, put them on a body with human rights in the name, and then make sure that it ignores every horrifying atrocity in the headlines while focusing on Israel. It's just too obvious. It has to be a prank, doesn't ir? An idea by some UN bureaucrat to expose the corruption of the organization by making it inescapably obvious.

Except that it was for real.

Obama took us into the UN Human Rights Council. Trump and Nikki Haley took us back out.

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The Trump administration announced Tuesday it was withdrawing the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, with U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley calling the 47-member council “a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.”

Haley noted the move came after a year where “we did not see any progress.”

Haley threatened the pullout last year, citing longstanding U.S. complaints that the council showed a “chronic bias” against Israel. Calling it "an organization that is not worthy of its name," Haley decried the membership of countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela -- which also have been slammed for human-rights violations.

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Of course the media will trot out its expected fake news spin, claiming that the Trump administration is isolating itself from the world and the human rights abusers of the HRC.

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Haley has been the driving force behind the latest move, which would be unprecedented in the 12-year history of the council. No country has ever dropped out voluntarily. Libya was kicked out seven years ago.

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It's a 12 year history. That's 3 administrations. Bush refused to join. Obama joined. Trump is taking us out. The only administration in this vast 12-year history to want to be involved is Obama. 2 out of 3 chose not to be.

But the media's gotta media.

And the Human Rights Council was only created because its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission had become a complete and total sham. Matters became so bad that the US was voted off it.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/27050...niel-greenfield