Participating in the circus known as the United Nations is like drinking a cup of Drano. Sure, it will clean you up inside, but it will leave you feeling hollow – and dead.
What is the best way to punish nations that engage in barbaric and brutal acts against their people? You reward them with seats on the Human Rights Council, of course! It has officially happened: The inmates are running the asylum. That is the only way to describe what took place as serial human rights abusers were awarded membership to a council that ostensibly exists to promote and protect human rights around the world.
UN Approves Serial Human Rights Abusers
The UN recently added more than a dozen nations to its Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), a body within the UN that maintains special monitors to assess the state of human rights in member nations by conducting periodic reviews of their records. The purpose is to spotlight abuses, but critics say it engages in hypocrisy. After this latest decision, it is hard to argue with that premise.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro
The international body recently elected 14 new members to the 47-member council for three-year terms, effective January 1. This was a controversial vote because the UN ended up selecting alleged serial human rights violators, particularly Libya, Mauritania, Sudan, and Venezuela.
Despite a campaign to reject these countries, the UN went ahead and approved their membership.
Soon after the results were announced, there was a widespread rebuke. Israel’s UN Ambassador, Danny Danon, said in a statement that the UN “continues to abandon human rights and is now in the business of protecting dictators and war crimes.” Philipe Bolopion, deputy director of global advocacy for Human Rights Watch, averred that “electing serial rights abusers like Venezuela betrays the fundamental principles it set out when it created the Human Rights Council.” Former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, who heads the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights, stated that the “process is a sham” and “its results bring shame.”
The HRC already has several nations with questionable human rights records, including China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Somalia. So, what is a few more among friends? That said, let’s explore how the latest entrants are certainly not the paragons of human rights.
Libya
In December 2017, Liberty Nation’s Jeff Charles published a detailed report highlighting a resurgence of slavery in Libya. Criminal gangs are everywhere, smugglers are prevalent, and slave auctions are commonplace. The enslaved Africans reside in tumultuous conditions, suffering daily beatings and rape. Those who attempt to flee are murdered. If you are not enslaved, then you are held for ransom or forced into prostitution. An influx of migrants, extreme poverty, and Islamic terrorism are all factors, but, as Charles wrote, the 2011 invasion and killing of Moammar Gaddafi played an instrumental role.
Mauritania
In 2011, several independent human rights observers discovered a horrific situation in Mauritania. Security personnel were torturing detainees to get confessions; methods consisted of pulling out hair, electric shocks, sexual violence, sleep deprivation, and beating people in the jaguar position (suspended from an iron bar with hands and feet tied together). That was not all. Detention centers were found to be overcrowded, dilapidated, and disease infested, and many of the prisoners were arbitrarily arrested and denied a fair trial.
Sudan
For years, it has been reported that Sudan suffers from slavery and that many government officials encourage it. In Darfur, Black Arab militias perform systematic massacres as part of their ethnic cleansing initiative; the UN has estimated that as many as 300,000 civilians were killed in the region between 2003 and 2010. Overall, the country continues to experience religious, female, and LGBT persecution.
Venezuela
Thanks to socialism, Venezuela’s economic collapse has metastasized into a humanitarian crisis. The country is starving, disease is spreading, poverty is rampant, and the government is cracking down on political opposition and critics of President Nicolas Maduro. Earlier this year, Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, published a scathing report on Venezuela, describing instances of extrajudicial killings, authorities torturing prisoners, and withholding food and medicine from the public.
A Watchful Eye
UN Watch, a non-governmental organization that functions as a watchdog of the global entity, published a report days before the vote that found these four nations had atrocious records respecting human rights. In fact, using the UN’s membership criteria, these countries would fail to qualify. Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, likened the decision to “making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief.”
Is it any wonder why the US abandoned the council this past summer? The entire UN ecosystem has become a parody, a meme, a joke. As LN’s Graham Noble recently opined:
“The UN is the largest and most cumbersome intergovernmental organization, and, with a few exceptions, it has utterly failed to prevent war or make anyone’s life easier. Today, it exists only to give petty tyrants the illusion of being able to demand the rest of the world take them seriously and to provide globalist elites with the bureaucratic apparatus they need to advance the concept of one-world government.”
Despite the group’s best efforts in recent years, the UN is beyond reform. It will never be made great again because it was never great in the first place. The experiment is over; it is time to disband. When serial human rights abusers join a human rights organism, you have reached peak woke.
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