Minnesota's Norm Coleman has been the number one advocate in Congress for holding the United Nations accountable. He has continued that effort by introducing S. 1698, the Human Rights Council Funding Reform Act of 2007. The operative portion of Coleman's proposed statute reads:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no funds appropriated or otherwise made available by any Act for contributions for international organizations may be made available to support the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The following is an excerpt from Norm's statement on the record in support of his proposed legislation:

Last year, a call for reform led the United Nations to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, which had included the likes of Libya and Sudan as members, with a new Human Rights Council. The Human Rights Council celebrated its one year anniversary last week, but unfortunately this anniversary was nothing to celebrate. Despite concerns about the structure of the new Council when it began operating, no one anticipated that within one year it would be possible to gut the intended agenda of the Council and make a mockery of its stated purpose on the scale that the Human Rights Council has managed to do.

In short, after five regular sessions and four special sessions, the Council has proved that it is nothing more than a platform to launch vitriolic attacks against one country - Israel. Despite the fact that the Human Rights Council is tasked with monitoring the human rights situation of all 192 members of the UN, the only country that has been directly condemned through country-specific resolutions is Israel – which has been subject to 9 resolutions, or 75% of all resolutions passed by the Council. In keeping with this selective focus, the Council has called three special sessions - which are intended only to address the most egregious and urgent human rights situations - on Israel. And for anyone that remains unconvinced about the blatant bias of the Council, the governing rules of the “Program of Work” were established with only one country-specific agenda item – the human rights violations of Israel in the Palestinian territories. The sad irony was that this decision was adopted while Hamas carried out murderous attacks against fellow Palestinians in Gaza.

Only 3 non-condemnatory measures were adopted last year on the human rights situation in Sudan despite its perpetration of a genocide, and beyond that there was zero consideration of human rights in all of the remaining 190 UN member states. In its annual report of the state of freedom in the world, Freedom House lists 19 of the “worst of the worst” human rights violators, none of which were given any consideration by the Council except for the feckless gestures passed on Sudan. In other words, the response of the Council to the state-sponsored brutality in countries such as North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe, and Belarus was a deafening silence.

The truth is that members of the Council are too busy trying to protect themselves from criticism for their own human rights abuses and taking political shots at Israel. And they are succeeding – this past week when the governing rules were passed, the mandates of the special rapporteurs for human rights in Cuba and Belarus were eliminated. This should come as no surprise when there are not even minimal requirements for democracy or respect for human rights to run for membership on the Council. Predictably, less than half of the states on the 47- member Council qualify as free democracies and current members include countries like Cuba, Azerbaijan, Angola and Saudi Arabia.

I would note that this bill does not cut off U.S. contributions to the UN, but it makes it U.S. policy that the contributions we give to the UN are not to be used for supporting the Council. I would urge my colleagues to join me in expressing their disappointment with the Council by supporting this bill.

For more on the the U.N.'s hypocrisy and fecklessness, see this post from earlier today on the treatment of Sudanese refugees by Egypt--a proud member of the Human Rights Council--and the U.N.'s inability to find anyone to criticize but Israel.

One might think that the moral bankruptcy of the U.N. would be obvious to everyone in Washington, but it is not so. In Congress, Norm Coleman is the most effective advocate for sanity in the U.N., and for responsibility in our relationship with that organization.

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Posted by John at 11:07 PM  |    |