As Townhall reported last week, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have invited the United Nations (UN) to come to the United States and investigate any “systemic racism” and human rights abuses in American policing.
“The United States intends to issue a formal, standing invitation to all UN experts who report and advise on thematic human rights issues,” Blinken wrote in a July 13 statement. "As a first step, we have reached out to offer an official visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism and the UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues. I also welcome the UN Human Rights Council’s adoption today in Geneva of a resolution to address systemic racism against Africans and people of African descent in the context of law enforcement.”
At the UN, “Special Rapporteur” is the title given to an individual or member state assigned to advise and publicly report on specific human rights issues, and then make policy recommendations to solve any abuses. Special Rapporteurs are appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council (HRC), a body of 47 member states from around the world that is explicitly responsible for protecting freedom of expression rights, as well as the rights of women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities.
A commitment to protecting human rights is noble, but this is the UN we're talking about. Since its HRC is the body that would appoint international actors in a potential investigation, it is important to recognize the rampant human rights abuses among its current members. Particularly, the records of the 15 new HRC members elected last October should raise some serious doubt into the UN’s authority to lecture America about human rights — especially in terms of their citizens' interactions with police. (HRC elections function similarly to U.S. Senate elections, with members serving three-year terms and one-third of all members up for election every year. No member can serve more than two consecutive terms.)
The 15 new members are: Bolivia, China, Côte d’Ivoire, Cuba, France, Gabon, Malawi, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Senegal, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Uzbekistan.
This list is terrifying. Nearly all of these member states have egregious human rights abuses on their record currently, never mind throughout centuries of their history. From a glance, it seems that only France and the United Kingdom are advanced democracies aligned with the U.S., both geopolitically and from the standpoint of governing values. And given the harsh Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns in both of these countries, the idea that the U.S. has a better human rights record than any of the new members arranging an investigation is not a far-fetched argument to make.
The 2020 member class is also reflective of the direction that the HRC seems to be heading. Seasoned American adversaries like China and Russia have ascended to the council, and the council’s Latin American-Caribbean delegation has experienced a similar authoritarian shift. Coup-plagued Bolivia and communist Cuba have replaced Chile and Peru, relatively democratic members of the council whose terms expired last December.
Police abuses and severe democratic limitations in many of these countries need no introduction. China and Cuba have been communist nations for more than half a century, and the measures taken by their respective governments to suppress protests from Hong Kong to Havana are well-documented. Both countries have recently weaponized state authorities against peaceful freedom fighters and therefore should have no say in appointing anyone to investigate policing in the U.S.
Russia, while no longer a soviet stronghold, is not much better. Vladimir Putin has ruled there for more than two decades with an iron fist. Efforts to improve civil liberties are silenced with old-fashioned police brutality, and opposition leader Alexei Navalny is facing nearly three years behind bars for his anti-Putin activism.
Beyond the obvious, the HRC’s African delegation — a particularly relevant group in arranging any investigation into abuses against people of African descent — is no saint of human rights either.
In Côte d’Ivoire and Malawi, investigations into violence against women are often dismissed or covered up by police. In Senegal, similar investigations are particularly dismissive of LGBTQ citizens, and they often end in beatings or worse. In the rare case that investigations are treated seriously in any of these countries, police impunity remains a serious problem.
And in Gabon, a former French colony on the west coast of Central Africa, political prisoners are subjected to harsh conditions by the political dynasty that has ruled since 1967. Last August, two students active in the Human Rights League at Gabon’s largest university were reported missing. Information about the students is limited, but the U.S. State Department reported that they remained missing as of last December.
Uzbekistan is plagued by many of the same abuses rampant among the HRC’s African delegation. Journalists and religious activists are often jailed and given excessive sentences, while those suspected of “extremism” face intense restrictions on their rights to travel freely throughout the country.
Police in Nepal, another landlocked Asian nation, are often complicit in human trafficking, a cruel practice known to disproportionately subject black women to violence worldwide.
Lastly, the countries of Mexico, Pakistan, and Ukraine have decent human rights records, at least when compared to this joke of an HRC class. However, all three face serious internal threats to ensuring their commitment to upholding rights for their citizens.
Mexico has been crippled by cartels for years, leading police to torture suspected drug smugglers — and even kill them extrajudicially. More recently, the ongoing U.S.-Mexico border crisis has prompted the Mexican authorities to attack their own people for traveling toward the border. The border crisis has also caused rampant police corruption as wealthy cartels take advantage of police officers eager to better provide for their families.
Pakistan still grapples with Islamic terrorists, and the increasingly limited U.S. presence in the region has seen a resurgence in support for the Taliban. And Ukraine faces assaults from an aggressive Russia and an apathetic Europe, whose efforts in Crimea have been consistently crushed by the Putin Police.
Because the UN trusts all of these countries to be stalwart authorities on human rights, any effort by them to coordinate an investigation into the flawed policing of a great nation founded on a recognition of God-given human rights will simply provide a forum for the Special Rapporteurs to air their grievances toward the U.S.
In fact, this has already been happening for several months. In March, the Chinese Communist Party issued a report about the poor state of human rights in America. The death of George Floyd, Donald Trump’s Wuhan coronavirus response, and gun violence were among the topics cited in the report.
In the eyes of the UN, condemning some unfortunate events while shipping members of a religious minority off to concentration camps by the thousands apparently qualifies a country to send a delegation to speak about “human rights” on the world stage. The UN has no shame, and the Biden administration’s attempt to cozy up to its investigators suggests it has no shame either.
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