Can Britain Òm human rights body4
THE TRUMP administration has built up a decent record of walkouts over the past year.
Last June, the US president announced plans to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord because the deal would undermine his country’s economy. Then in October the US walked out of Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency that Washington sees as anti-Israel.
This is a White House that is steadily disengaging from multilateralism, so it was not a huge surprise when Nikki Haley announced plans this week to leave the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
“For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias,” Ms Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Tuesday.
“The world’s most inhumane regimes continue to escape scrutiny, and the council continues politicizing and scapegoating of countries with positive human rights records in an attempt to distract from the abusers in their ranks.”
She was referring to the presence of such countries as Saudi Arabia, China and DR Congo among the council’s members.
As Ms Haley walks out of the council, though, Britain is staying firmly inside it.
Countries need to talk to each other about human rights and the council is the “best tool available”, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in a late-night statement on Tuesday, “to address impunity in an imperfect world and to advance many of our international goals.”
He added: “We’ve made no secret of the fact that the UK wants to see reform...but we are committed to working to strengthen the Council from within.”
The IsraeliPalestinian conflict makes that especially hard. Britain and the US have long complained that UNHRC meetings have a permanent slot — the notorious agenda item 7 — to discuss rights abuses in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. No other part of the world has a dedicated fixture like this; earlier this week Mr Johnson called the practice “disproportionate and damaging to the cause of peace”.
But after 60 Palestinians were killed in clashes with the IDF across the Gaza border on a single day last month, it was the UNHRC that voted for a resolution that condemned Israel, made no mention of Hamas and sent a team to investigate human rights abuses in all Palestinian territories, not just Gaza. Only two countries opposed it; Britain was not one of them. It said the motion was a “partial and imbalanced”, but opted to abstain.
It did not bode well for the strength of UK diplomacy or for Mr Johnson’s ambition to strengthen the UNHRC from within.
That it is Donald Trump who has pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Commission does not make it wrong. Indeed, far from being a mistake, this is a sensible and important move because the UNHRC has long debased the very notion of human rights. It exculpates dictatorships and tyrannies while condemning — almost to the exclusion of everywhere else — democratic Israel. Over the past decade, the UNHRC has not issued a single condemnation of China, Cuba, Russia, Somalia, Turkey, Venezuela, Yemen or Zimbabwe. But it has issued 68 condemnations of Israel. Let’s not beat around the bush here: the UNHRC is an institutionally antisemitic body. The behaviour of its members, including such luminaries of human rights as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, DR Congo and Venezuela, shows that the UNHRC has only two purposes: to attack the world’s only Jewish state and to stop any criticism of their own human rights abuses.
As Ken Roth — no friend of Israel — of Human Rights Watch has put it: “Imagine a jury that includes murderers and rapists, or a police force run by murderers and rapists, who are determined to stymie investigation of their crimes.” The US has been criticised on the grounds that it is better to stay in and fight for sanity rather than walk away. But this — which is the British position — is a ridiculous argument. The US has been a member of the UNHRC throughout the past decade, and its membership has made not the least difference to the organisation’s behaviour. The UNHRC is a foul, bigoted and illegitimate body and the US should be commended for leaving it.