Last week, the US was voted out of the UN Human Rights Commission. Rights violating nations such as Sudan, Libya, and Syria, were voted in. What does this vote tell us about the nature of the UN and of its members?
Well, it clearly tells us that most of the UN’s members don’t care for human rights. If they did, they would not have elected savage dictatorships and terrorist sponsors to oversee and protect human rights in the world. Nobody that really cared about hens would put the foxes in charge of the hen-house. According to the UN itself, Sudan’s government is directly responsible for “displacement, starvation, and killing of civilians, looting and burning of villages, abductions and rape.” Libya and Syria have been known sponsors of international terrorism for over three decades. Sierra Leone, another country voted in, has been recently denounced by the UN for committing “abuses of human rights … with impunity, in particular atrocities against civilians …including executions, mutilations, abductions, arbitrary detention, forced labor, looting, [and] killings of journalists.” [For modern examples of slavery in Africa see Walter Williams’ article “Black Slavery is Alive in 2001“–Editor]
But we shouldn’t really be surprised with the vote’s outcome. After all, Russia has been in the UN Human Rights Commission since its creation, in 1947, despite having been a totalitarian state where human rights were non-existent for most of that time. How then could the commission have had any credibility at all?
The answer is that the presence of the US gave the UN Human Rights Commission credibility. Now that the US is gone, it has none.
Americans should realize this fact and start asking themselves a couple of questions. For instance: Should the US have been sitting in the commission with communist Russia for almost half a century? And more importantly, should the US still be a member in the UN alongside dozens of dictatorships that have no respect for human rights? Why should the US grant these nations the legitimacy that they do not deserve?
The reason why the US accepts these dictatorial nations is because America has partially fallen for the false ideologies of self-determination and multiculturalism. Self-determination holds that every nation has the right to determine its own form of government, regardless of how brutal or unjust that form might be. Multiculturalism holds that all nations and cultures are equally moral and should be treated with respect regardless of their particular nature. But in reality, not all forms of government are equally just and not all nations are morally equal. Most nations, in fact, are hopelessly unjust and immoral, and should not be granted any recognition or respect, but only strict condemnation.
The US should stop financing and supporting an organization choke-full of dictatorships like the UN. The US presence in the UN serves only to legitimize these tyrannies’ existence and their continuous abuse of human rights. To sanction evil is as impractical as it is immoral. The US cannot hope to protect human rights by associating itself with human rights violators.
Of course, the US should continue to pursue a foreign policy that supports human rights, but should do so on its own, or in alliance with other nations that actually share its values. If America really cares about human rights, the best thing it can do is to take this opportunity and withdraw from the UN. Then the world may get the message that human rights are more important that membership in a corrupt and morally bankrupt organization.
Related website: The United Nations is Evil
