The U.S. has announced their decision to pull out of the United Nations Human Rights Council. This is a much needed move by the United States, and ironically shows they are being leaders in the world on this issue.
The country leaving sounds very bad until you realize that some of the worst human rights abusers are on that council, and it’s a thinly-veiled anti-American and anti-Israel body. The council for foreign relations cites bloc voting, loose membership standards and bias against Israel as the leading issues that make the council ineffective. The blocs are often based on regions and view economic and regional concerns as more important than punishing human rights abusers.
Most of the single country resolutions and four out of the six special sessions were aimed at condemning Israel. This creates a moral blind spot where incidents around the world receive far less attention and scrutiny, or as Victor David Hanson once quipped, Israeli and American misdemeanors are highlighted while Arab felonies are ignored.
An example of this trend can be easily found in the Syria reports from similar agencies. UN war crimes investigators concluded that al-Assad used sarin nerve gas over 20 times in the past four years, killing at least 83 civilians. The investigators also attacked the US for its supposedly reckless attacks on civilians, particularly an airstrike in Mosul that killed dozens. This toothless investigation doesn’t do anything about actual war crimes but condemns American efforts to stop genocidal terrorists.
The war crimes commission also failed to properly interpret the rules of war. These explicitly prohibit the use of human shields. Even before ISIS and al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein excelled in placing civilians in and around military targets. They also hid weapons in hospitals, schools, churches, and civilian neighborhoods. The US still has an obligation to use proportionality to try and minimize civilian casualties, but any civilian casualties are counted as a war crime against those using human shields or abusing neutral sites, not against the striking power.
But the rules of war have changed from common sense application of moral codes that apply in the heat of battle to excessively legalistic notions that nitpick to such a degree that basically any use of military force is condemned. America makes mistakes, but those are often concentrated on and exaggerated to the point that many people can’t tell the difference between legal and justified military action, and the mass killings of opponents. In some ways this is intentional, as radical peace advocates want to prevent the use of any force.
Using the UN as a tool for nationalist interest undermines the mission of the United Nations for whom these people work. Emmanuel Kant explained the philosophy basis for having a world body or even a world government. Modern theories that expound on this generally do not advocate a wholesale dismantling of the sovereign states system but incremental innovations in global institutional design to move humanity toward world federalism or cosmopolitan democracy. In plain language, the UN should be a force for good by helping to override what can be selfish and self-destructive tendencies of nation states.
But the UN Human Rights Council and many of its other bodies are often used as tools of nation states to further their anti-American and anti-Israel bias. This undermines the strength of the body and gives America cause to leave.
In conclusion, it seems counterintuitive and even destructive to the UN for the US to leave the Human Rights council. But given the corruption of its mission by member states the leading super power, despite its mistakes and exaggerated political narratives against it, can be the leader of human rights for the world by leaving the UN.
