Posted on 06/05/2017 11:53:02 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Trump administration may decide to follow the example of George W. Bush and wash its hands of the UN’s Human Rights Council. Reuters reports this morning that the US may announce as soon as tomorrow that it will withdraw from the panel unless the UN commits to serious reform, especially in its obsession with Israel at the expense of real human-rights abuses:
The United States is expected to signal on Tuesday that it might withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council unless reforms are ushered in including the removal of what it sees as an “anti-Israel bias”, diplomats and activists said.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, who holds cabinet rank in President Donald Trump’s administration, said last week Washington would decide on whether to withdraw from the Council after its three-week session in Geneva ends this month.
It won’t be the first time that the US has pulled out of the UN’s panel on human rights. Bush withdrew the US from its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, in 2005 for the same reasons that Trump and Haley propose to do so now. The inclusion of major human-rights abusers as council participants created an environment where it became awfully convenient to go after Israel rather than allow the UN to look at their own records. The UN recast the panel into its current form in 2006, but the Bush administration declined to take part in it as the reforms appeared insufficient. Barack Obama applied for full membership in early 2009.
At the time, then-Secretary General Ban Ki-moon applauded the move, because US membership would “help blunt the influence of some of the council’s most repressive members,” according to the Washington Post at the time. That seems like a strange admission, though; why not just bar the UN’s “most repressive members” from sitting on the panel in the first place? That way the US wouldn’t need to act as a balance, and the panel might actually generate some credibility on the issue.
However, some still think that’s a workable strategy:
Eight groups, including Freedom House and the Jacob Blaustein Institute, wrote to Haley in May saying a withdrawal would be counterproductive since it could lead to the Council “unfairly targeting Israel to an even greater degree.”
In the letter, seen by Reuters, the groups also said that during the period of the U.S. boycott, the Council’s performance suffered “both with respect to addressing the world’s worst violators and with respect to its anti-Israel bias.”
At some point, though, participation looks less like blunting influence and more like implicit endorsement of the nonsensical farce at Turtle Bay. Haley warned about this review in an op-ed in the Post on Friday, expressing the administration’s fast-dissipating patience with the UNHRC and their total lack of credibility on actual human-rights abuses:
Venezuela is a member of the council despite the systematic destruction of civil society by the government of Nicolás Maduro through arbitrary detention, torture and blatant violations of freedom of the press and expression. Mothers are forced to dig through trash cans to feed their children. This is a crisis that has been 18 years in the making. And yet, not once has the Human Rights Council seen fit to condemn Venezuela.
Cuba’s government strictly controls the media and severely restricts the Cuban people’s access to the Internet. Thousands are arbitrarily detained each year, with some political prisoners serving long sentences. Yet Cuba has never been condemned by the council; it, too, is a member.
In 2014, Russia invaded Ukraine and took over Crimea. This illegal occupation resulted in thousands of civilian deaths and injuries, as well as arbitrary detentions. No special meeting of the Human Rights Council was called, and the abuses continue to mount. …
The presence of multiple human rights-violating countries on the Human Rights Council has damaged both the reputation of the council and the cause of human rights. When the world’s preeminent human rights body is turned into a haven for dictators, the idea of international cooperation in support of human dignity is discredited. Cynicism grows. There is already more than enough cynicism to go around these days.
The UNHRC has been an utter joke since its launch in all of its forms. There is no good reason to remain on the panel; it should be denigrated publicly as often as possible, and no US funding should go toward its operations. Clearly, eight years of participation has not incentivized the UN to clean up its act, so perhaps a few years of ridicule and boycotts are worth a try. That strategy at least forced the UN to act in some manner in 2006, so it’s worth trying again.
Good and give them 30 days notice on their lease.
Hell YES !!
The UNHRC is a façade which has used by leftists, muzzies, and so called globullers to cover their violations.
This guy is such a Lefty....
ROTF LMAO
Third world hooligans and thugs who sit on the Human Rights Council of the UN:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/CurrentMembers.aspx
Get us out of the UN and get the UN the hell out of the US!
UNaccountable bureaucrats. DEFUND
Look at the world and what in the hell has this Human Rights Council done. The Council is made up of just about the bunch of fools that are from countries that are the worst violators in the world.
Such as producing DVD rewinders.
YES!!!! and then either pull of of the UnitedNazis entirely...or else SUBSTANTIALLY reduce our payments to UN and limit our participation to just exercising our veto power over the worst krap UN tries to do.
oh yes, TELL THEM TO MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE!
all having them here does in let in several thousand enemy agents and moles and spies into USA from Islamic and communist countries
U.S OUT OF U.N.; U.N.OUT OF U.S., NOW!
Send them packing to Brussels, Paris or Beijing!
Most UN members are thugs and dictators. We have no business being a part of this disgusting organization other than having veto power.
I agree, but Port-A-Prince, Kandahar would be my selections.
I am very pleased whenever I read about an Executive move which President Trump makes to negate the total desecration committed by his terrible predecessor. The fact that the weak kneed Republican Majority in Congress refuses to jump on board is a problem. The country needs tax cuts, it needs a stronger economy, and it needs border security, i.e., a WALL. The people know this and that is why many Republican Congressmen were given the opportunity to ride President Trump’s coattails back into office. Time to get to work I say. Until our weak kneed Congress begins to act, President Trump should double down on any actions he can take to eliminate Obama’s legacy forever and ever.
Ditto from me. Reforming the UN or any part of it is a waste of time. You can’t reform a rattlesnake. US out of the UN and UN out of the US!
Why didn’t he do this on the day he took office?
Yes, it is a huge problem.
Unfortunately, the solution (getting rid of the Republicans in the Senate, and, to a lesser degree, in the House) is a bigger problem, cuz Dems will try to impeach Trump.
I don’t know the answer. Not since Harry Truman (and before him) William Howard Taft has a president had so obstructionist/do-nothing a Congress.
I’ve asked DJ to weigh in: What can be done? What happens when Trump has “doubled down” as far as he constitutionally can on each and every program?
I think there are SOME inventive ways to circumvent. For example, I recommended to Team Trump that they ask the Saudis to make $10b of that “infrastructure” commitment to the state of TX in the form of a grant specifically to build the wall. Now, of course, you can’t say that up front. It all has to be a wink and a nod, but with Abbot, you can do that. Then he’d have to get HIS people in line and say, “This money is coming in, but it’s only for the wall.” Then it would have to be built according to federal specs. But it could be done.
But as to solving the Senate? I don’t know what we do. Even if we can primary one or two of these guys, there are at least 20 turds in this punchbowl, most of whom aren’t up.
So much winning, it’s hard to take...not.
I wish I had a definitive answer. It’s very difficult when the opposition (the bipartisan establishment cabal, that is) keeps moving the goalposts all over the place. Frankly, we could use a temporary dictatorship to place things back where they belong across the spectrum. Implementing more laws won’t work when our existing laws (and Constitution) aren’t being followed and we’re at the mercy of black-robed thugs and tyrants there to stop ANY modest agenda to restore America to sanity and law & order.
I personally believe these thugs want to provoke a Constitutional crisis, perhaps hoping Trump “oversteps” in their opinion (of course, when THEY overstep their bounds, they never face consequences) so he can be removed from office. It would be at that point that President Trump would refuse to abide by this coup d’état by the corrupt and lawless establishment and mobilize tens of millions of Americans to rise up and protect his (and their) government.
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