At 75, the UN is embracing failure

A systemic rot has spread through the organization and its agencies

By  Jonathan Levin, ISRAEL HAYOM

The United Nations, the successor to the failed League of Nations, is now in its 75th session. However, while seventy-five may be a big milestone, the UN has few reasons to celebrate. Although born amidst high hopes, the UN is now a systemically rotten organization that is embracing failure, repeating the errors its founders warned to avoid.

One factor in the League’s failure – an often cited one – was the departure of many states, including Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan, and Soviet Russia. Germany left due to disagreements about disarmament, Italy left after the League imposed sanctions on it for its invasion of Abyssinia and its use of chemical weapons, Japan departed after the League published a report blaming its conduct in Manchuria, and the USSR was expelled after it invaded Finland in 1939.

The UN’s founders tried to prevent this failure from reoccurring by outright prohibiting nations from leaving the organization (unless the UN is failing its purpose). However, all their efforts did not make the UN a success, and today, seventy-five years after its founding, the UN is a systemically rotten organization that favors and assists human rights abusers, engages in racism, and persecutes democracies.

In today’s UN, leadership positions often go to the worst offenders of human rights. For instance, current members of the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) include Mauritania, where people are enslaved based on their skin color; China, which engages in genocide and cultural genocide; as well as Russia and Venezuela, none of whom have stellar human rights records. Additionally, Saudi Arabia, a state where women only gained the right to drive in 2018, is an executive board member of UN-Women, and Iran was recently elected to the Women’s Rights Commission.

Forget a clause forbidding states from leaving. Which dictatorship would want to leave? The rewards – leadership positions and praise – are great, and the UN allows human rights abusers to cover up their crimes. Shockingly, the UN has even assisted them in their abuses – the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights has turned over the names of Uighur dissidents to Beijing, a practice a UN court defended. The League of Nations may have put sanctions on Italy in 1937 for using chemical weapons, but when Syria did the same a few years ago, no sanctions were imposed (Russia and China vetoed all western attempts to do so) and Syria, on rotation, even chaired the UN’s disarmament conference in 2018!

The UN also engages in rampant anti-Jewish racism and has an unhealthy fixation with Israel. In 2020, the General Assembly directed nearly 75% of all country-specific resolutions at Israel. Additionally, in both November 2020 and May 2021, the WHO (a UN agency) deviated from discussing COVID-19 to attack one country only – Israel. These actions, just the tip of the iceberg, are evidence of widespread racism at the UN.

The systemic rot in the UN has spread through the organization and its affiliated institutions, including the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although independent from the UN, the ICC cooperates with the UN at the highest levels, including giving annual reports to the General Assembly. The ICC uses its power to target democracies and is currently investigating alleged war crimes committed by Israel, and the US in Afghanistan.

Furthermore, although it recently dropped an investigation into alleged British war crimes in Iraq, the ICC’s chief prosecutor still claimed that there was “a reasonable basis to believe” that British troops “committed war crimes.”
What makes the ICC’s decisions so astounding is that it declined to investigate China’s genocide against Uighur Turks in December, saying that it wasn’t a party to the Rome Statute (neither is Israel and the US, but the ICC found ways to persecute them). It even went as far as to write about the Chinese deportations that “Not all conduct which involves the forcible removal of persons from a location necessarily constitutes the crime of forcible transfer or deportation.”

All these actions, taken by the UN and its affiliates, are evidence that the UN has a worse human rights record than the League had. The UN’s actions are so egregious, that if it were taken by the League, it would be tantamount to putting Hitler’s Germany on the Human Rights Council, Mussolini’s Italy on the Disarmament Conference, praise for Imperial Japan’s conduct in (then) occupied China, and would likely include 75% of resolutions condemning Jewish settlement in the British Mandate of Palestine (it’s worth noting that the earliest extra-biblical mention of the people of Israel in the region dates to 1207 BCE).

Yes, the UN has accomplished many good things too, but that will not be enough to render the UN a success if it collapses. After all, no one remembers the League’s successes, which included addressing human trafficking; settling territorial disputes, thereby preventing numerous wars; gaining the emancipation of 219,000 slaves in Sierra Leone (Ironically, Mauritania, with a large slave population, is on the UNHRC), and repatriating 400,000 POW’s of twenty-seven different nationalities after World War One.

If the UN collapses, people will only discuss its failures, not its successes. Moreover, we will have no excuse, as we have already been warned about this by one of the UN’s architects, Winston Churchill. In his 1946 speech “The Tragedy of Europe,” Churchill described why the League failed, with words that can also describe our contemporary UN: “The League of Nations did not fail because of its principles or conceptions. It failed because these principles were deserted by those States who had brought it into being. It failed because the governments of those days feared to face the facts, and act while time remained. This disaster must not be repeated. There is therefore much knowledge and material with which to build; and also bitter dear-bought experience.”

Compared to the League, the UN’s actions are egregious. The UN hardly even seems to care about its job anymore, and its founding states turn a blind eye to its behavior. Don’t say we weren’t warned about the consequences of allowing this to continue.

We have – by one of the UN’s founders – and we are already beginning to reap the ills of the UN’s current rot. This pandemic, and the detriment that the world is suffering partially due to the WHO running to do China’s bidding at the beginning of the outbreak, is a warning to us of the dangers of continuing to allow the UN to betray its founding principles. We cannot afford to allow this to continue. The UN is now at seventy-five. Now is the time to push for reform.