This article first appeared in the Council on Foreign Relations.
The United Nations General Assembly will soon begin, with the traditional opening address by the Brazilian President to be followed by a speech by the US President.
This year’s speeches and activities will be, as always, a mix of interesting and boring, important and useless, honest and hypocritical.
Whatever is said in the speeches, why can’t the United Nations do more to promote freedom?
Although the preamble to the UN Charter states that the purpose of the UN is “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights”, the UN’s track record in achieving that purpose has been, at best, very mixed.
The answers are clear: many of the member states are dictatorships that commit terrible human rights violations. And they stand together. That last point is key: the worst countries are far more united in defending their violations than democracies are in defending human rights.
One important mechanism for protection against human rights violations is the so-called “Group of Like-minded Nations,” which typically consists of Algeria, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bhutan, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Russia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.As Human Rights Watch’s excellent new report on China’s violations of the UN system, “The Costs of International Advocacy,” notes:
These countries: [Security] The Council has worked together to weaken the universality of human rights standards and resist the Council’s ability to adopt country-specific approaches.
They have shielded repressive governments from scrutiny by including promoters of these countries’ human rights records on the speaker list during the Universal Periodic Review and by uncritically featuring friendly governments and government-affiliated non-governmental organizations (GONGOs).
What a terrible list of countries! Only North Korea is missing from the list – a rogue’s gallery indeed.
A Rohingya Muslim woman rides in a tuk-tuk near a camp set up on the outskirts of Sittwe city in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, May 21, 2015. A Rohingya Muslim woman rides in a tuk-tuk near a camp set up on the outskirts of Sittwe city in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, May 21, 2015. Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty
Their “like minded” ideas are to jail dissidents, thwart press freedom, corrupt or prevent free elections, suppress human freedoms, etc. So what is India doing in this rotten club?
For India, which is steadily moving its foreign policy away from the Third World nonsense of the past few decades, it is time for a rethink: if liability by association carries any weight, then in India’s own interest, it should not be included in this group.
The point is, democracies need to be better organized.
Human Rights Watch’s report on China shows the astonishing attention China is devoting to distorting, subverting, and undermining UN activities of all kinds, far beyond the work democracies are doing together to protect UN institutions and ensure their integrity.
This would be another good project for Nikki Haley, who is a great U.S. ambassador, but it’s clearly going to be a long-term effort that will require the cooperation of multiple administrations in Washington and multiple U.S. permanent representatives to the United Nations, and it’s going to require determined efforts not just from the U.S. but from democracies old and new around the world.
To save the United Nations, we need to show the same commitment, shrewdness, and energy that many of the world’s worst countries are showing in their efforts to cripple it.
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.