WASHINGTON – The United States should “lead the charge” for reform in the United Nations Human Rights Council before considering whether to rejoin it, US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft said Monday.
“I will work tirelessly with my successor to help in any way possible to uphold our shared values,” she said at a Heritage Foundation event titled: “How to fix the broken UN Human Rights Council.”
“Responsible nations of this world must come together to fix the UN Human Rights Council, because any further delay betrays the victims of torture in Venezuela and the more than one million religious minorities facing detention in China,” she added.
Regarding China’s and Venezuela’s human-rights records, Craft said the council “includes the voices of the very human-rights violators it was designed to counter.”
“I cannot turn away from the people in Venezuela, Syria and South Sudan, and I cannot turn away from the mistreatment of the Taiwanese, the Hong Kongers, the Tibetans, the Rohingyas and many, many more,” she said.
The US withdrew from the Human Rights Council in 2018, citing its biased treatment of Israel and failure to address serious abuses throughout the world.
US President Donald Trump worked hard to address the Human Rights Council’s problems, Craft said.
“But when nothing changed, we made a principled decision to withdraw,” she said. “The Human Rights Council has given us no reason to reconsider our decision. In its current composition and direction, the council is failing to live up to its name.”
Regarding the council’s treatment of Israel, Craft said: “We must deal with the insanity at the center of the Human Rights Council’s persistent and egregious anti-Israel bias.”
“Israel is the only country singled out by the council for scrutiny under what is known as Agenda Item 7,” she said. “No other country is targeted in this way – not the murderous Assad regime in Syria, not the disastrous Maduro regime in Venezuela and not the Chinese Communist Party responsible for abuses; not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. Israel, only Israel.”
“Again, Item 7 has a single purpose: to provide a platform for nations to target Israel,” she added. “It does nothing to advance dialogue, human rights or the cause of peace, and it must go.”
Craft said the Abraham Accords are a way to bring normalization, peace and prosperity to the Middle East.
“We just had Morocco,” she said. “We were really going to move forward with this, and that’s the way that I think we can counter a lot of the countries in the Human Rights Council – by securing more countries in the Abraham Accords and by securing normalization in the Middle East.”