US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has reinforced global opinion that the current leader of the free world sees little value in dialogue, unless it advances his country’s geopolitical interests.
Trump seems to relish the role of the backyard bully as a badge of honour, while the international arena of cooperation created by his predecessors slowly crumbles around him. From trade, to immigration, to transnational cooperation, nothing is too sacred to tear up and renegotiate.
While his ‘my way or the highway’ approach to diplomacy can yield results, as it seems to be doing with North Korea, and even backfire, as it seems in the case of Iran, but there are broader, systemic harms that come from his aggressive approach.
The Trump administration claims the UNHRC is ‘hypocritical and self-serving’ in the way it demonises Israel, an accusation routinely levelled at the president himself by allies who have come to believe his ‘America First’ policy is simply code for ‘you don’t matter.’
To analyse this debate, we must first define the terms being thrown around. First, what are human rights? These can be distilled to two key themes in light of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: equality and freedom.
States must, in theory, ensure equality for all citizens across socioeconomic, political, religious and legal dimensions. And moreover guarantee freedoms of movement, employment, assembly, religion and choice. The victors of World War II reached a consensus on safeguarding these rights as inalienable and universal after they realised mass oppression and injustices inevitably led to great wars.
Qualifying ‘hypocritical’ and ‘self-serving’ is harder, as these words are inherently subjective. For example, the US repeatedly condemns the UNHRC’s ‘unfair’ laser-focus on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, yet itself exercises selective morality without remorse. This is hence a case of the pot calling the kettle black. In fact, Washington’s track record in recent decades demonstrates it rarely weighs in to uphold human rights globally unless economic or political mileage is available.
Besides summarily ignoring the long-standing Indian atrocities in Kashmir and Myanmar’s genocidal campaign against Rohingya Muslims, the Trump administration is also making a mockery of human rights at home by forcibly caging small children away from their asylum-seeking parents under the pretence of ‘zero tolerance’ toward illegal immigration.
He has now bowed to mounting pressure at home and abroad in scrapping the separate detention order, but the prospect of indefinite internment for these families still looms large.
The mission statement of the UNHRC is to promote and protect human rights worldwide, which is why Washington’s retreat is a body blow to its credibility and effectiveness. It bears remembering that since laying the cornerstones of the incumbent world order in 1945, and specifically following the end of the Cold War, the US has for better or worse acted as mankind’s moral compass.
In fact, many of the ideals aspired to in various UN conventions closely mirror those of America’s founding fathers. The US has thus symbolised the political and military will necessary to safeguard universal human rights without preconditions.
Regrettably, the timing of Trump’s decision could not be worse. His tasteless recent tweet criticising German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming hapless Syrian refugees into her country is symptomatic of the ill wind of strident nationalism blowing through once compassionate Western democracies. Scapegoating of immigrants has spiked in France, Italy and Austria, and this contagion threatens to envelop the continent.
Many of the ideals aspired to in various UN conventions closely mirror those of America’s founding fathers. The US has thus symbolised the political and military will necessary to safeguard universal human rights without preconditions
Now let us explore the wider harm that may result from Trump’s decision. The message Washington delivered to the world by quitting the UNHRC is that the international system of rules governing human rights has failed, which is untrue. It is merely flawed.
And when a system is flawed, it requires internal tinkering to correct course, which the US should have done by proposing reforms to the 47-member forum aimed at improving its performance. Because you don’t ditch a car when it has a flat, you fix it.
Instead, going forward, should the US justify future acts of economic or military aggression against Russia, China, Iran or even North Korea by citing human rights violations, it will act as judge, jury and executioner to the detriment of the very people it is trying to protect.
Since going solo on global concerns like human rights will embolden repressive regimes worldwide to similarly defend their actions because if Washington can do it, why can’t we? The US is hence setting a dangerous precedent by trivialising the process of consensus among UN member states that has to-date kept World War III at bay for a good eight decades.
Furthermore, in ridiculing the UNHRC for handing memberships to states with spotty human rights records such as Saudi Arabia and South Sudan, the Trump administration conveniently forgets a founding principle of the UN: consensus-drive change.
It is far more intuitive to hold such countries accountable within a rules-based framework where the majority of global opinion can be mobilised against them if they renege on their commitments, than letting them run rogue outside the system.
Finally, though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has praised Trump’s decision, it is hard to see how quitting the UNHRC will down the line protect Israel’s interests. Since without Washington as a hefty counterweight, the anti-Israel lobby in the agency will gain more strength and push for tougher sanctions against the Jewish state.
Trump in many ways is trapped in a turn-of-the century time loop where ideological battle-lines were clearly drawn and the mere whisper of a US military intervention would make foes quiver in their boots.
In today’s multi-polar world, however, his actions inspire more loathing than fear and risk sidelining the US from mainstream geopolitics. And that would be a real shame given Washington’s historically immense contributions to world peace.
The writer is an Islamabad-based independent journalist
Published in Daily Times, June 25th 2018.