Time to delegitimize the UN

By Judith Bergman, ISRAEL HAYOM

It was recently publicized that Saudi Arabia has been elected to chair the U.N. Human Rights Council panel in charge of appointing independent experts. According to theU.N. Watch independent monitoring group, Saudi Arabia was chosen to head the Consultative Group, a five-member group of ambassadors that has the power to select applicants from around the world for more than 77 positions dealing with human rights mandates. These include positions such as the U.N. special rapporteur on violence against women and experts for working groups on the issues of discrimination against women and the rights of migrants and religious minorities.

One does not quite know whether to laugh or cry at the appointment of one of the worst human rights offenders in the world to head the selection of such experts. Indeed, Michael Moller, director-general of the United Nations Office at Geneva, does look a little bit uneasy in the photo taken of him, as he shakes the hand of the Saudi ambassador to Geneva, Faisal bin Hassan Trad, at his appointment. It must have been difficult for this Danish-born diplomat, hailing from a Scandinavian country so intensely committed to the pursuit of justice and human rights, to hide a grimace. After all, he was appointing the ambassador of a country where public beheadings are not the actions of criminals or terrorist organization like Islamic State, but a regular working feature of the legal system, which is modeled according to Shariah law. Perhaps the thought of petrodollars made the handshake easier.

Saudi Arabia was first elected to the Human Rights Council in 2013, without any protests from the U.S. and the European Union.

The appointment of Saudi Arabia to head this important U.N. Human Rights Council panel displays, once more, how deeply corrupt and truly meaningless the U.N. system and the U.N. Human Rights Council in particular are in practice. What does it say about the Human Rights Council that it appoints a country that regularly beheads dozens of its own citizens, as well as several of the 9 million foreign workers who constitute over half the workforce and frequently work in slave-like conditions for their Saudi Arabian masters?

While such an appointment clearly undermines any minuscule remnant of credibility that the U.N. Human Rights Council may have left, it should give pause to those who still believe the U.N. can play any credible role in international relations. More than anything, it shows the depraved state of the self-appointed guardian of world human rights.

Unfortunately, it would appear that most human rights advocates do not care much about this appointment, as there has been precious little reaction from them worldwide. Even more disturbing, the same human rights advocates who are so quiet about this are extremely vocal about perceived human rights violations by Israel. It only proves, once more, that they do not truly care about human rights.

What is the innocent blogger Raif Badawi, who has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes in public and 10 years in a prison in Saudi Arabia, supposed to make of this appointment, other than that the international community apparently approves of such punishment for a man who blogged about freedom of speech?

We in Israel hardly have any illusions left when it comes to the U.N., yet we still expend a lot of effort in responding to various U.N. commissions of inquiry, as if anything they conclude carries any kind of meaning or weight. Perhaps it is finally time to create an alliance of nations, with Israel in its midst, to effectively lead a campaign of delegitimization of the U.N., based on that organization’s blatant depravity and utter moral corruption. This is not something that Israel would be able to carry on its own, but although the number of decent nations in the world is shrinking fast, it is still not too late to find allies who might also have an interest in exposing the true face of the U.N. The organization is an expensive and obsolete bureaucratic monster, and there must be other states who would like to see it exposed and reformed.

Or is that too vain a hope?