sSecretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday morning that President Biden has ordered the State Department to re-engage with the UN Human Rights Council. This decision prioritizes the government’s public relations strategy over concrete diplomatic results.
The “reengagement” case with the council is based on a misrepresentation of Trump-era United States diplomacy in Geneva, and perpetuates the deeply damaging narrative that says that as much as the Human Rights Council may be flawed, it is not worth it. rock the boat to demand changes.
The Trump administration withdrew from the council in June 2018, citing structural problems that bias it against Israel and the continued involvement of serial human rights violators. Although it has occasionally done valuable work in Syria, North Korea and some other human rights hot spots, the council is often hijacked by its many authoritarian members. “Such advice, in fact, undermines the cause of human rights,” said former UN ambassador Nikki Haley when announcing our departure.
Proving their right last year, Russia, China and Cuba won their elections for seats on the board, and the body passed five resolutions critical of Israel and none criticizing its newest members who violate human rights. His control over the council is so ingrained that some of the UN special rapporteur positions he created have only ratified deeply damaging authoritarian discussion points.
The Biden government is not completely unaware of the problems that afflict what Blinken called “a defective body in need of reform”; instead, it says that re-engagement is the best way to prevent authoritarian regimes from using it to their advantage. But Biden officials are still wearing pink glasses, convinced that their slogans on human rights and multilateral engagement will be sufficient to bring about positive improvements.
Blinken notes that America “will engage with the Council as an observer”, as if this were a significant change in policy. But not that. Not only does the observer status not exist, but the previous administration also effectively continued to participate in the activities related to the council in that capacity, even after the end of its mandate. She played a role in the “universal periodic review” of countries’ human rights records throughout 2019 and 2020 and organized events in Geneva on human rights abuses in Venezuela and in the Uighur concentration camps in China.
In fact, until the United States officially seeks a seat on the council, the only real change is that Biden is ordering American diplomats to attend some council meetings. Overall, however, the Biden government is loudly declaring that it will do what the previous team did more discreetly – a reassuring message for European diplomats and human rights NGOs.
Which leads to another fallacy advocated by the Biden government narrative – European diplomats and NGO officials, instead of the 2018 withdrawal, represented one of the most persistent obstacles to significant board reform.
When the Trump administration took office in 2017, a formal reform process was already scheduled to begin in 2021, but officials refused to accept another four years of status quo. And so the government – hoping to succeed where the Obama administration failed – started an aggressive campaign to change the council, covering some 200 meetings with diplomats and human rights defenders throughout 2017 and early 2018. Diplomats first sought change fundamental to the council’s anti-Israel agenda and loose membership criteria, but when it became clear that this was politically unviable, they expressed their willingness to accept less ambitious measures that would have changed their daily operations.
Still, at every step, American diplomats were blocked. European delegations killed a modest package that would have simplified the council’s agenda and diluted the debate over its numerous anti-Israel resolutions. The NGOs fought against a reform proposal that would have turned their annual Human Rights Council candidate forum into an event run directly by the UN (the groups objected, of course, out of a selfish desire to continue holding these events themselves).
If there is any doubt about the weak link when it comes to tackling human rights violators in the Human Rights Council: Even before Washington decided to leave the body, the Chinese delegation managed to adopt a resolution endorsing “mutually beneficial cooperation”. language approved by the Chinese Communist Party on human rights in March 2018. Only the US voted against the measure. European countries, fearful of antagonizing Beijing, abstained.
But after Washington left, the other democracies learned to defend themselves, and when China proposed a similarly worded resolution last year, the majority voted against it.
Biden’s team should have tried to leverage the new foresight of these US allies to first seek reform of the board before announcing their re-engagement. The US delegation could have worked discreetly with other democracies before the March session of the council – which will begin the 2021 reform process – conditioning its return to support for reforms.
Instead, the new administration opted for the more flashy option that advanced its “Diplomacy is back” narrative, probably without gaining anything of substance.