President Joe Biden brought the U.S. back into the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2021 knowing that countries with terrible human rights records, like Russia, were members — which is partly why President Donald Trump left it.
The UNHRC was formed after its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, was discredited as a club of dictators. President George W. Bush chose not to join, after the new UNHRC looked to be plagued by many of the same problems.
Newly-elected President Barack Obama sought to bring the U.S. into the UNHRC in 2009, eagerly reporting on America’s own supposed human rights abuses, such as efforts by states like Arizona to enforce federal immigration laws on the border.
But Obama could not reform the council, either, and it remained a forum for tyrannical regimes to sanitize their own human rights abuses while singling out Israel for condemnation when it attempted to defend itself from radical Islamic terrorism.
In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the UNHRC, after warning it for years that its obsessive focus on condemning Israel, and its tolerance for human rights abuses by members such as Russia and China, had discredited the council completely.
In his 2017 address to the UN General Assembly, for example, Trump warned: “[I]t is a massive source of embarrassment to the United Nations that some governments with egregious human rights records sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council.”
Trump eventually withdrew the U.S. from the UNHRC, concluding that it could not be reformed. Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media complained, and Biden sought to rejoin as soon as he took office in 2021.
The Biden State Department argued: “[O]ur withdrawal in June 2018 did nothing to encourage meaningful change, but instead created a vacuum of U.S. leadership,” vowing to use “the full weight of our diplomatic leadership” to reform it.
Though Russia and China were members, Secretary of State Tony Blinken declared: “The Council plays a meaningful role in protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms by documenting atrocities in order to hold wrongdoers accountable.”
The Biden administration now plans to urge member states to suspend Russia from the UNHRC over Ukraine — a request that Russia, with its dominant position on the UN Security Council, and its alliance with equally dominant China, will resist.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.