Exit with reason
No need for U.S. to stay in Human Rights Council
By no means excusing the briefbut-execrable policy of taking children from their mothers on the southern border, the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations was right to withdraw the U.S. from the Human Rights Council.
This move was justified long before last week when the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized U.S. policy at the Mexico border as “unconscionable.” On Wednesday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end the separations.
The U.S. is undergoing a re-evaluation of its relation with the rest of the world, and one thing that the Trump administration has decided, rightly, is that the U.S. has no obligation to live up to the hypocritical standards set by other countries, with much lower standards than its own.
By staying in the council, the U.S. has been enabling — and paying for — practices that are continuously anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli. The U.S. does not have to take it, and it is finally saying so.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley called the council “a cesspool of political bias.”
She said that “the world’s most inhumane regimes continue to escape its scrutiny, and the council continues politicizing scapegoating of countries with positive human rights records in an attempt to distract from the abusers in its ranks.”
As examples, she cited Venezuela, Iran, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
None of those countries deserves to have an opinion on the moral conduct of the U.S. Ms. Haley could also have mentioned Saudi Arabia, one of our allies.
It will seem to many that now is exactly the wrong time for the U.S. to act holier than thou.
The Trump administration was rightly battered for separating children from parents who crossed the border illegally, but the U.S. withdrawal from the council has been coming for some time.
The council’s anti-Israel bias and its hypocrisy do not serve the cause of human rights anywhere.
There should be some basic standards for membership, as the U.S. has proposed, futilely.
Just as the U.S. is resetting its economic relationships around the world to shed some of the self-sacrificial role the U.S. has assumed in the past 50 years, so too is its political and diplomatic standing due for a reset. The administration’s recent decision to quit UNESCO — the U.N.’s educational, scientific, and cultural agency — was a step in that direction.
If other countries of the world want to find a scapegoat to distract from their own bad behavior, let some other members of the Human Rights Council play that part for a while.