It May Be Time to Leave the United Nations

The United Nations recently announced its 2022 members of the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC), prompting questions as to why the United States is still a member of not just the Human Rights Council, but the United Nations itself.

HRC President Nazhat Khan announced early last year that "The strength of the Human Rights Council is its diversity.”

The extent of its “diversity” became clear on December 29 when Geneva, Switzerland-based United Nations Watch executive director Hillel Neuer listed “The Top 10 Worst Regimes Who Will be Sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Council starting this Saturday, January 1st, 2022:” They include:

10. Pakistan

9. Mauritania

8. Qatar

7. Somalia

6. Russia

5. Libya

4. Cuba

3. Eritrea

2. Venezuela

1. China

Neuer then identified each country’s “credentials” for inclusion in the Human Rights Council.

He observed that Pakistan is a state-sponsor of terrorism, persecutes religious minorities including Christians, Hindus and Sikhs, and supports China’s genocide of its Uighur population.

He said that Mauritania, on Africa’s west coast, maintains a slave population numbering half a million, arrests anti-slavery activists and sentences homosexuals to death.

Qatar is also a state-sponsor of terrorism — including al-Qaida — and, like most Middle Eastern countries, regularly discriminates against women. In addition, it was responsible for the death of 6,750 Asian migrants working for the 2022 World Cup.

Somalia, according to Neuer, was especially "a living hell" for women, who are at constant risk of being either shot or raped, and 95% of girls from ages 4 to 11 face genital mutilation.

Russia, he said, “tortures detainees, imprisons opposition leader Alexei Navalny, crushes freedom of speech and assembly.” In addition, Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has shown little regard to other countries' sovereignty, as Ukraine and Crimea can attest.

Libya is a wholly lawless society, which actively tortures migrants and engages in extrajudicial killings while operating under an unelected government, earning it the distinction of being the “Worst of the Worst” by Freedom House.

Cuba, lying 90 miles south of Key West, maintains a 60-year tradition of totalitarianism by shutting down freedoms of speech and association, while blocking food and medical aid to its people.

Eritrea, located on the Africa’s horn, promotes torture, forced child labor, and arbitrary arrests and executions. Its government curtails basic freedoms of speech association, and religion, and regularly conducts private trials.

In Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro attained wealth and power by converting what had once been a thriving capitalist society into one marked by squalor. Five million Venezuelans have fled the country after Maduro's starving of his people and crushing pro-democracy dissidents.

China has sent one million Uighurs to slave labor camps, and jailed human rights activists. Freedom in Hong Kong has been shut down and men and women who sounded the alarm over COVID have disappeared. The people of Taiwan live in fear of being crushed like those in Tibet.

These are the star players in the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, class of 2022. It claims to be “responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe and for addressing situations of human rights violations and make recommendations on them,” according to its website.

Including these 10 nations in the HRC will neither protect human rights nor change their behavior — it only emboldens them. It rewards them.

Two years ago the United Nations hosted a display featuring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s “achievements in the field of human rights.” This is Iran — the largest state-sponsor of terrorism in the world, and which is hell-bent on developing a nuclear weapon in order to bomb Israel out of existence.

The display prompted Townhall political editor Guy Benson to ask if it included “Any pics of gays hanging from cranes.” The then-U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell could only say, “this is unbelievable.”

No, this isn’t unbelievable; this is the Human Rights Council. And because it’s a "hypocritical" organization that "makes a mockery of human rights,” the United States resigned from the HRC in 2018.

But given that the Biden Doctrine, if one exists, is to reverse all the accomplishments made by the previous administration, the Biden White House announced that it would approach the U.N., hat in hand, and seek reentry into the HRC.

But hypocrisy isn’t just limited to the HRC — it’s also emblematic of the United Nations as a whole.

This suggests that it may be time to withdraw from the U.N., kick the United Nations out of New York, and convert the UN Building into something worthwhile — like maybe a shelter for homeless veterans.

It’s about time we stopped enabling the bad behavior of other countries and started taking care of our own people.