Nations United Against Rights

On Friday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with congressional leaders to assuage their anger at America's ejection from the UN's Human Rights Commission. The meeting seems to have been a success; it looks as if Republicans in Congress will give up their attempt to block $244 million in UN dues.

Thus ended the only American response to an action that exposes the dangerous fraud at the heart of the United Nations.

Consider the meaning of the rights commission vote. The UN voted not to reappoint the United States to its seat on the commission ... but in the same vote, it gave a seat to Sudan, a country that tolerates the practice of slavery.

What was the reason for this perverse decision? According to Joanna Weschler, the UN representative of Human Rights Watch, America lost the vote because "there has been a growing resentment toward the United States (because of) votes on key human rights standards, including opposition to a treaty to abolish land mines and to the International Criminal Court, and making AIDS drugs available to everyone." Translation: The complaint against America is that we did not agree to compromise our national defense, our national sovereignty and our property rights. In a similar vein, other diplomats have cited, as contributions to the UN's anti-American "grudge," the Bush administration's pursuit of a national missile defense and its opposition to international global-warming controls, which would require us to shut down American industry.

Judging from these complaints, one would think that the United States was a dangerous rogue nation, from which the rest of the world must be protected.

Yet while we are supposed to subject ourselves to more UN restriction, the Human Rights Commission is doing its best to shield the world's worst dictatorships. As a Reuters report puts it, "the 53-member commission (is) turning into an 'abuser solidarity' group with more and more countries with questionable human rights records gaining election and then voting as a bloc against singling out individual nations for human rights abuses." The commission contains a slew of such "questionable" countries ... from Russia to Indonesia ... whose citizens do not enjoy one-tenth of the legal protections we Americans take for granted. But the real stars on the commission are the outright dictatorships, the folks with fresh blood on their hands: Sudan, Libya, Syria, China, Cuba and Vietnam.

Perhaps the UN is right after all. The United States does not belong on the same "human rights" commission with these countries.

What is the status of an organization dedicated to international peace and "human rights" ... while it harbors the world's worst tyrannies, who use their votes to escape criticism and denounce free nations? Yet this is a description, not just of the Human Rights Commission, but of the UN itself. It is an organization in which dictatorships enjoy equal status with free nations, in which they are empowered to gang together, joined by every second-rate power resentful of American strength, and pass judgment on any assertion of American interests. As Ayn Rand once described it, the UN is like "a crime-fighting committee whose board of directors includes the leading gangsters of the community."

Note, however, the reaction of so-called human rights activists. When Congress threatened to withhold UN dues, these activists urged America instead to increase its support for the UN. On May 10, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Human Rights Law Group, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, and Physicians for Human Rights, among others, joined together to issue an appeal to Congress for greater cooperation with the UN. Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch declared: "Instead of writing off the commission, the United States should take the process of multilateral diplomacy more seriously." In other words, if we just appease the UN, maybe they will be a little nicer to us and not quite so nice to Sudan. What an inspiring vision for the future of individual rights.

Those who really care about individual rights ... and who recognize America's role as the world's pre-eminent defender of freedom ... should do much more than issue a few petty threats over UN dues. They should ask whether the United States ought to belong to the United Nations at all.

Yes, America should seek to cooperate with other nations to promote international peace and protect individual rights. But we cannot do so by cooperating with an organization that serves the interests of the aggressors and dictators.

Related website: United Nations is Evil