Now is the time: The US and Israel should leave the UNHRC

Leaving the UN Human Rights Council is as imperative as leaving UNESCO.

By Giulio Meotti, INN

It has been called “the worst place to be a woman or a child”. It is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has been governed by Joseph Kabila since 2001, for years a site of mass expulsions and killing, civilian casualties, war, rape, exploitation of natural resources. A genocide in the Congo has caused hundreds of thousands of casualties. There is a real humanitarian emergency in the country, with at least 400,000 children at risk of starvation. Between May and June, 42 mass graves were found in the Congo accounting for more than 400 deaths, including two UN officials sent to the Congo who disappeared on March 12.

And what could the United Nations Human Rights Council have done to honor those dead? No less than electing the Congo to its own committee, of course. That is what happened. There are fifteen new members of the Human Rights Council and the Congo is among them.

The Congo’s election to the world’s first human rights body is perhaps the lowest point in the history of UN agencies, competing for that place with the election of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations Women’s Committee last April.

US Ambassador Nikki Haley called the Congo’s selection another example of why the Human Rights Council lacks credibility and needs to be reformed. Haley previously had suggested the possibility that the United States could leave the Council during a visit to Geneva in June. The Congo’s election to the world’s first human rights body is perhaps the lowest point in the history of UN agencies, competing for that place with the election of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations Women’s Committee last April. This UN Human rights Council is obsessed with Israel and has tried to demonize the Jewish State and incite against its citizens with hundreds of resolutions .

Louis Charbonneau, the envoy of Human Rights Watch at the UN, called the Congolese election “a slap to the victims of the Congolese government”. But that was not the only travesty. Qatar was also elected to the Council, despite its support of terrorist organizations (Hamas, Hezbollah and Jabhat al Nusra), the inability of its citizens to choose their own government in free and fair elections, the restrictions on freedom of expression and association, the ban on parties, the denial of religious freedom, the discrimination against women and foreign workers.

And Geneva could not miss Afghanistan and Pakistan, another two new members, despite their sectarian violence, torture and other humanitarian wonders (Pakistan is the country which condemned a woman named Asia Bibito to death for being Christian).

French mathematician Laurent Lafforgue commented that allowing these dictatorships and satraps to dominate the UN human rights watchdog would be like “appealing to the Khmer Rouge to form a group of human rights experts”. The Khmer Rouge is the Communist guerrilla group responsible for a genocide in Cambodia during the ’70s.

Perhaps, after UNESCO, it is now time that the United States and Israel abandon the UN Human Rights Council, and make us recall why it was founded.