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The Obama Watch
Sleeping With the Retrograde
The Obama administration gets ever cozier with the UN’s human rights defilers.
Contrary to what many might suppose, there is much continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama in the sphere of foreign affairs and counter-terrorism.
Guantanamo Bay remains open for business; renditions still occur, as do wiretaps; and conducting drone strikes on Islamist terrorists — though the Obama Administration won’t call the targets that — have actually increased.
Bush in his second term stopped calling for the release of human rights activists in Egypt and Libya, whose temporary release he had procured in his first term. Obama has been faithful to that inglorious silence too.
Yet, as expected, there has also been much change in 16 months: For example, Bush refused to have the U.S. join the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), but Obama did just one year ago.
Why? To “promote universality, transparency, and objectivity” within the Council, according to the Administration’s document, Human Rights Commitments and Pledges of the United States of America; to “engage in the work of improving the U.N. human rights system,” according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and because “the promotion and protection of human rights internationally is a core value of the United States and a fundamental cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy,” according to UN Ambassador Susan Rice.
Universality, transparency, objectivity, improvement, promotion and protection of human rights are in desperately short supply in the HRC, because it suffers from a permanent majority of dictatorships. Non-democratic African and Asian regimes exercise an unbreakable controlling majority of 26 of its 47 seats. It is these dictatorships that set the Council’s agenda and determine its vote. In four years, the HRC has closed off investigation of the worst human rights abuses in Belarus, Sudan and Zimbabwe.
Provision does exist for suspending council members for human-rights abuses, but to do so would require approval by a two-thirds majority of the UN General Assembly — which has been unable to muster a simple majority merely to condemn the genocide in Sudan. Such a provision is clearly a dead letter.
Now, the Obama Administration has announced that it will join the UN Alliance of Civilizations, another body dominated by autocracies, to work for “improved understanding and cooperative relations among nations and peoples.”
But does the record of the HRC since America’s embrace of it justify another such attempt to improve the retrograde?
Hardly.
One month after the Obama Administration joined the HRC, it terminated investigation into human rights abuses in Congo.
It was the HRC that commissioned the Inquiry into the Gaza hostilities, presided over by South African Apartheid-era hanging judge, Richard Goldstone. The Goldstone Report perverted international legal norms and procedures to find Israel guilty of war crimes in Gaza. To its credit, the Obama Administration found its voice to oppose further UN action based on this report. But its presence on the HRC did nothing to forestall or alter this demonization of a fellow democracy — or prevent the UN General Assembly from endorsing it.
This April, the Obama Administration’s presence on the HRC did not stop it from electing a serial human rights abuser Iran, a country distinguished by its public hangings of homosexuals. The Obama Administration had to engage in a back room deal to have Iran withdraw its candidacy — but at a steep price: that Iran be elected unopposed to the UN Women’s Rights Commission.
A couple of weeks ago, America’s presence on the Council also counted for nothing when 155 out of 192 member states voted for another serial human rights abuser, Libya, to receive a seat on the HRC. So powerless did America appear that Ambassador Rice could not bring herself to even condemn the decision and fell back on the novel argument “the United States doesn’t reveal for whom we vote.”
This will surely surprise those who recall the U.S. public fight in 2003 to keep Libya off the HRC’s predecessor, the Human Rights Commission.
Meanwhile, the HRC continues to ignore the opposition of democratic states towards criminalizing what its advocates term “defamation of religions” — a measure designed in practice to silence criticism of just one religion — Islam. US opposition within the HRC has been consistent — and ineffective.
In the words of veteran UN watcher, Claudia Rosett, the HRC remains a “‘reformed,’ renamed, but unimproved reincarnation” of its discredited predecessor. U.S. membership of the HRC has availed the cause of human rights nothing. The Obama Administration should learn from the experience, withdraw from it, and give the Alliance of Civilizations a miss.
About the Author
Daniel Mandel is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, London, 2004). His blog can be found on the History News Network.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (23) | Leave a comment
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Brian Mc| 5.28.10 @ 7:27AM
As I have stated here, before.
Put a big lock on the door with a sign:
"U.N. closed until further notice...Go home and hold open, free elections; form a republic, come back and we'll talk"
FTM| 5.28.10 @ 11:30PM
I think that it's high time to serve the UN an eviction notice, preferrably in the middle of a general session and welded to a plow blade on a Cat D-10 tractor.
I personally consider it to be a disgrace that Sudan, a nation where human slavery is practiced publically and in the open could hold a chairmanship of the UN human Righhts council. This is not now the case but was a couple years back. This pretty mucch exposes the UN to be the petty, irrelevant sham organization that it is.
Get the US out of the UN and the UN out of the US.
Jeffrey| 5.29.10 @ 1:12AM
Amen! 155 times.
rhonda lee welsch | 5.29.10 @ 7:40PM
I second the motion- all in favor......
Petronius| 6.1.10 @ 5:15PM
Left out the bit about millions of Coptic Christians slaughtered in that region. But global smarming takes precedence at HRC. The UN is nothing but a platform for anti-American grandstanding and espionage in our country. Let's roll!
Louis Jenkins| 5.28.10 @ 9:43AM
The Human Rights Commission is rife with members who themselves are violators of Human Rights. The Pretender n Chief has only joined a body of politicians who are of the same mind: Kill, destroy, or harm those who seek freedom.
Lullaby's, Legends and Lies| 5.28.10 @ 10:48AM
Iran sitting on the Un’s Woman’s Rights Commission, just proves, that the UN is a complete joke (and has been for a long time), and that all “Free” Countries in the World should withdraw from this International travesty if they actually believe in, and want to fight for Freedom.
Kick the UN out of New York, and if we feel it’s still important enough to have some sort of International body like this, despite all its past failings, then let’s start all over again with a much stricter enrollment process. The rest of the World if they choose to (or because they don’t have a choice), can remain with the old UN, but it’ll only be filled with the crap Countries of the World, like Iran, Libya, China, Cuba, or should I say, basically all the Islamic Countries, the Dictatorship’s, and the Communist Countries of the World, who don’t enjoy freedom of anything, and don’t want to enjoy those freedoms either. Then and only then, would it make sense that Iran is sitting on the Woman’s Rights Commission.
Why do we pretend to take this International body seriously anymore, when it’s obviously a total failure. Is it just to make ourselves feel better, to pretend that we actually care about what the rest of the World thinks, and that we really want to hear what their opinions are? Who cares what the rest of the World thinks!! Let them clean up their countries, let them clean up their acts, and then come back and talk to us, and then maybe we’ll listen. Until then, get out the U.S. of the UN now!!
Pete| 5.28.10 @ 4:50PM
It is just another way to push the blame off for further eroding our freedoms. If the "World" makes this or that decision, who are we (the former US) to argue? Naturally, the World is comprised of unexceptional countries who have all more or less succumbed to big government rule. Can you imagine what their ruling on something like, say, the 2nd amendment is likely to be? It is a farce, but a very real and dangerous one given our current "leadership."
FTM| 5.28.10 @ 11:39PM
The preacher at the church I attend is a big proponent of severly restricting private ownership of firearms. The guy isn't smart enough to keep his mouth shut and true to form one morning in Sunday school stated his opinion. I laughed at the guy and asked how he proposed to take my guns from me. I said that the cops and the militarty are on my side of the issue and beings as how I was the one that had the gun how do you plan to disarm me? The guy looked like a hooked catfish.
Truly, one of the good things about living in Ameria is that anybody that wants a gun can have one. The bad thing about living in America is that anybody that wants a gun can have one.
The problem as I see it, regardless of which side of the issue that you're on is that there is no way known to stop stupid. Ignorance can be fixed but stupid is forever.
dcd| 5.28.10 @ 6:29PM
To make a competitor to the UN actually work it would need some incentive to join. Limiting free trade and most favored nationhood to members who abide by rules could work. This won't happen because the world is far more interested in cheap phones, diamonds and oil than in opposing slavery, torture, terroism or pretty much anything else.
WAKE UP| 5.29.10 @ 12:53AM
"I think that it's high time to serve the UN an eviction notice, " (FTM, second comment way back at the top)
FTM is dead right: the UN should be relocated in the corrupt home country of any one of its corrupt members (there are plenty to choose from) , and then abandoned by the West to its own devices.
Richard Baker| 5.29.10 @ 7:35AM
It's been long past time to evict the UN from Turtle Bay. Git!
Marc Jeric| 5.29.10 @ 4:23PM
UN has been a deadly joke from its inception: to have the mass murderers like Stalin and llater Mao sitting on the Security Council???
ROWDY BOOTS| 5.30.10 @ 11:19AM
obama, united nations dictators, what is the difference?
They are all arrogant idealogues who hate America and it's majority value system.
FIRST WE GET RID OF OBAMA, THEN WE GET RID OF THE U. N. BUILDING IN NEW YORK, THEN WE BOMB IRAN.
IT REALLY THAT SIMPLE.
ROWDY BOOTS
fjdk| 7.1.10 @ 3:49AM
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weddingdress | 7.12.11 @ 5:24AM
To make a competitor to the UN actually work it would need some incentive to join. Limiting free trade and most favored nationhood to members who abide by rules could work. This won't happen because the world is far more interested in cheap phones, diamonds and oil than in opposing slavery, torture, terroism or pretty much anything else