Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley were right to withdraw U.S. membership from the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday.
While that council purports to defend human rights, it actually focuses on far less noble objectives. Namely, attacking Israel, challenging Western liberal values of free speech, and lending moral credibility to the world’s most unpleasant regimes. Ignoring repeated U.S. challenges to address those failings, the council deserves neither U.S. diplomatic credibility nor U.S. taxpayer dollars.
To those who say that this decision will hurt global human rights, I say look at the facts.
The facts show that the Human Rights Council spends its time on pointless resolutions and worthless debates rather than serving human rights on the ground. Consider the chart below from the U.N. Commissioner on Human Rights.
The most obvious takeaway from that data is that the Human Rights Council spending neglects field activities. Instead, the U.N. continues to over-resource human rights operations at its headquarters (where the U.N.’s renowned bureaucracy wastes time on enough worthless paper stacks to make the Amazon rainforest weep).
Still, the chart also attempts to hide the bureaucratic bloat by presenting “headquarters support” as an adjunct of field operations. Also note the chart’s division of 12 percent of the total budget on the Human Rights council’s activities in Geneva. That’s millions of dollars very badly spent.
But what about those who say that U.S. withdrawal of the organization reflects a broader abandonment of U.S. moral values?
Again, consider the facts. While President Trump is mishandling the U.S. border crisis and has a penchant for ridiculous remarks, the U.S. remains resolute in defending the international liberal order. And in the sum of human history, no order has better served humanity’s expanded economic and human rights.
But Trump has also done more for human rights than the council in more tangible ways. For one example, Trump has now twice stood up for the international human right to avoid being drowned in an open street (the impact of high-concentration Chlorine agents on human lungs) and the right to avoid being suffocated by neuromuscular failure (the impact of Sarin nerve agents).
This is not to say that all U.N. entities are all equally bad. They are not. U.N. refugee support, health promotion efforts, and peacekeeping operations (in most cases) advance human well-being and deserve U.S. support. But too much of the U.N. remains unfit for purpose. And nowhere is that truer than with the Human Rights Council.
The U.N.’s own statistics show that the U.S. was the largest voluntary contributor to the organization’s 2017 human rights efforts. The Human Rights Council will surely miss that money. But if they want it back, they need only to start living up to their name.
