World Health Organization Grants North Korea Spot on Executive Board

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) concluded its annual meeting on Tuesday with the astonishing spectacle of electing North Korea – among the world’s deadliest regimes, a psychopathic nuclear-armed dictatorship that routinely murders dissidents and has deliberately starved a sizable portion of its population – to a seat on the ten-member W.H.O. executive board.

“What this means is that one of the world’s most horrific regimes is now a part of a group that sets and enforces the standards and norms for the global governance of health care. It is an absurd episode for a key U.N. agency that is in much need of self-reflection and reform,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the watchdog group U.N. Watch.

“A seat on the executive board provides North Korea with a vote on the appointment of the W.H.O.’s six regional directors, and potentially on an eventual replacement for Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general now serving his second and final term,” Neuer pointed out.

“The right signal from the U.N. to the North Korean regime would be an overdue referral to the International Criminal Court, and a call to investigate and prosecute Kim Jon-un’s heinous crimes against humanity – not an election to an organization that sets the standards for global health,” Neuer said. 

“If the WHO is to be effective and credible, the agency must be held to the highest standards. The election of North Korea sends the worst possible message, at a precarious time for the global agency,” he contended, alluding to W.H.O.’s credibility issues in the wake of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.

Neuer noted that the same session refused to allow Taiwan, which has a generally excellent record on public health issues, to attend because China – the source of the devastating pandemic and a documented liar to W.H.O. investigators – objected, and it specifically censured only one country: Israel.

“There has been no agenda item or resolution adopted on any other country, conflict, civil war or political impasse. Nothing on Syria,” Neuer narrated, “where hospitals and other medical infrastructure are deliberately bombed by Syrian and Russian forces; nothing on Afghanistan where the Taliban takeover has led to a collapse in basic health systems; and nothing on Ethiopia.”

The latter point is interesting because the current director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is Tigrayan, and the Ethiopian government sharply criticized him for allegedly supporting the Tigrayan cause during the civil war Neuer mentioned.

In fact, the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed accused Tedros of “treason” even though he was remarkably quiet about the devastating conflict in its early months. Tedros later spoke out against the humanitarian catastrophe created by the brutal civil war, in which nearly all parties have been credibly accused of war crimes. He has called the situation in Ethiopia “horrific,” a judgment few observers would dispute, and claimed the government of Eritrea had killed his uncle in the conflict. Eritrea sent support groups to aid Abiy’s forces.

W.H.O.’s sister organization at the U.N., the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said last week that the humanitarian situation in Ethiopia is “worsening” for more than 800,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) even though the war is nominally over, so billions of dollars in increased funding for aid is urgently needed. IDPs staged massive demonstrations last week to protest the suspension of humanitarian aid, a step reluctantly taken by various organizations because so much of the food and medicine has been stolen. The protesters also complained about the continuing occupation of land by hostile tribes and outbreaks of violence.

And yet, the W.H.O. could only think to condemn Israel – which, as Neuer pointed out, is a major global innovator of medicine – because Palestinian and Syrian representatives pushed for it. 

The murderous Syrian dictatorship has been sitting on the W.H.O. executive board for two years, and now, it has been joined by the even worse North Korean regime, which said it was “deeply concerned about the health conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” 

“Today’s assault on Israel at the W.H.O by some of the world’s most oppressive regimes promoted the lie that Israel is harming Palestinian health rights. The opposite is true,” Neuer declared. “The regimes who attacked the Jewish state were projecting: the more oppressive they are to their own people and to their minorities, the more they resort to trying to demonize the only democracy in the Middle East.”

“Anyone who has ever walked into an Israeli hospital or clinic knows that they provide world-class health care to thousands of Palestinian Arabs as well as to Syrians fleeing Assad,” he observed.

Neuer and U.N. Watch were not alone in expressing their outrage at North Korea’s election to the board. On Wednesday, Newsweek quoted human rights activist Ankit Bhuptani declaring “shock” that North Korea, “a regime infamous for starving its own people,” could be elected to the W.H.O. executive board while “Taiwan, an exemplary Covid response leader, is left out.”

OneShared.World founder and former W.H.O. advisory committee chair Jamie Metzl conceded that North Korea is “one of the world’s worst violators of human rights at war with its own population” and “clearly an enemy of public health at home and abroad.”

However, Metzl said W.H.O. was “probably right to err on the side of inclusion” because “public health is global and we are all connected in our interdependent world.” 

This is a variation on the reasoning frequently employed to justify keeping the genocidal Chinese tyranny involved with W.H.O, even after China lied to the organization and concealed vital information during the pandemic; it is supposedly better to flatter hideous regimes and keep them involved with global health initiatives than insulting them and risking their complete disengagement.