Wrong move by US to quit rights body
President Donald Trump should reflect on whether he is really serving the interests of abuse victims by quitting UN platform for defending their interests
Thanks to the inclusion of serious rights abusers, the membership of the United Nations Human Rights Council has often made a mockery of the qualities and values it is supposed to represent.
This is not about to change. The inclusiveness of the UN, however perverse the results at times, is fundamental to the concept of a multilateral approach to preventing conflict.
It is better to try to keep differences in-house than to weaken the unity of an organisation already accused of irrelevance from time to time. After all, few countries have unblemished human rights records or can claim all their friends do.
But to maintain credibility, the UN body needs leading member nations to take the high moral ground and call out the worst abuses, even if that means being called out in turn for hypocrisy. That is why the United States, which generally has a proud record of defending human rights, is wrong to have withdrawn from the council.
We cannot agree with the claim that America’s commitment to upholding rights would not allow it to remain part of a “hypocritical and self-serving organisation that makes a mockery of human rights”.