THE UN is dominated by despots with appalling human rights records. Now the campaign group UN Watch has revealed a plethora of human rights abuses in 15 countries whose new representatives sit on the UN Human rights Council (UNHRC). Seven, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, have such poor records that they fail to meet any criteria on human rights set by the UN itself.
Pakistan has form at the UN, having spearheaded the Islamist Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) attempt to introduce a global blasphemy law on Islam. Now that bid has failed the OIC, whose 57 member states dominate the UN, is pushing for countries to create their own blasphemy laws.
Many of the members of the UNHRC come from countries which have anti-Semitism at the core of their cultures. Unsurprisingly, the UNHRC spends most of its time passing discriminatory resolutions against Israel while ignoring horrific human rights abuses in other countries, including their own.
This disingenuous organ of the UN gives the world’s worst tyrants a convenient fig leaf. Its disproportionate focus on Israel means those who are truly suffering go unnoticed and unaided.
If the kind of membership of today’s UNHRC had been translated to the 1980s, it probably would have looked something like this film clip.
Joking apart, the UNHRC seems like one of those nasty playground cliques where schoolgirls unite over their unreasoned hatred of another pupil, each trying to outdo the other in how much they dislike the object of their childish scorn.
But that is not the worst part of the UNHRC. The composition of this organisation sends out a clear message about how governments truly view human rights. They are a nice-to-have. The UN’s premium on the sovereignty of every kind of regime from benign to murderous allows the latter to practise despotism to the point of mass extermination.
The 1975 Helsinki Accords, acknowledging the status quo in Europe, had provisions covering human rights. The signatory nations of the Warsaw Pact got away with ignoring these. Groups such as Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 which tried to hold their governments to what they had agreed were ruthlessly suppressed. Communist governments defended suppression as an internal affair of state.
Genocide is also seen as an internal affair of state. The reason for this viewpoint might be due to the composition of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Russia and China both unapologetically implemented genocide as an element of state policy during the twentieth century. Military intervention in Libya to prevent Gaddafi using mass murder to stem the spread of the Arab Spring is the exception that proves this rule.
One of the present writers, Paul, when a naive youngster, believed that the creation of the UN led by the victorious Allies meant that never again would the world witness a crime like the Holocaust. He was therefore dumbfounded when news broke of the Killing Fields of Cambodia, where 4million met their deaths. How could our world allow this to happen, he wondered. Older, sadder and wiser, Paul was not so disturbed by the horror of Rwanda. He understood how the world really worked.
The global inaction over Cambodia apart from, ironically, the unilateral intervention of the aggressively communist Vietnam, demonstrated the true nature of the post-war settlement. There is still no such a thing as universal human rights. It is just a wish.
It is in this context, of the global tacit acceptance of genocide, that the composition of the UNHRC can be viewed. There is widespread support in the Middle East for another Holocaust by those who complain that Hitler’s true failing was that he did not finish the job. Israel cannot delegate the protection of its people to the international community, least of all the UNHRC.
To try to impose human rights on unwilling populations is met with resistance, and goes against the concept of sovereignty. People appear willing to die so they will not be free. Human rights do not stem from an ingrained species-wide instinct, but from the willingness of populations to accept them. They are actually political in nature.
And that is the terrible unacknowledged truth. Human rights remain interchangeable with dictatorship. The composition of the UNHRC proves this. No wonder the US withdrew from it.
Another UN subsidiary, the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), passed a resolution in July singling out Israel as the only country to violate women’s rights. Dominated by representatives from such bastions of illiberalism and tyranny as Iran, Pakistan and Yemen, ECOSOC has never passed a resolution on the abuse of women in their own countries, for example condemning Iran for arresting women who remove their hijabs.
China is also a member of ECOSOC. No wonder ECOSOC and the UNHRC have refused to condemn China’s imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims in what are essentially concentration camps, a gross example of human rights abuse.
A letter written to the UNHRC in July by 22 concerned countries is revealing in its signatories. Mostly Western governments signed this letter condemning China’s heinous actions. A day later 37 other countries signed their own letter for support for China, citing its supposed human rights endeavours, an absurd defence. More than half of these signatories were Islamic states. Many of them have economic ties with China and, unlike the enlightened West, they seemingly prefer to let these take precedent over the suffering of innocents. These two letters reveal the fracture between the free world and the tyrannical regimes which monopolise the UN.
Why does the West still support it? So far this year UK has given over £100million to the UN’s regular budget and £250million to its scandal-riddled peacekeeping forces. The British government also is supporting the UN in its attempts to destroy Western economies through its insidious 2030 climate change agenda.
British taxpayers’ money is being flung at this useless behemoth so that the world’s worst tyrants can live in luxury and moralise on how dreadful Israel and the West are. Surely now Britain, the West and their allies should abandon the corrupt UN and set up their own organisation, free from Islamists and assorted despots.
