Trump Administration Pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council
By The Trump administration plans to announce its withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday, making good on a pledge to leave a body it has long accused of hypocrisy and criticized as biased against Israel, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley plan to announce the withdrawal at the State Department in Washington at 5 p.m., the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing a decision that hadn’t yet been made public.
The Trump administration has been throwing a temper tantrum about the United Nations Human Rights Council essentially from day one, so this isn’t surprising. Trump cannot play well with others. He just can’t. He’s dumb, incurious, arrogant, and mean. I don’t think Haley and Pompeo are as stupid as he is (although Haley is badly inexperienced and Pompeo is just bad), but that doesn’t mean that Trump’s fundamental hubris doesn’t structure how his team goes about performing their jobs.
In any case, while this isn’t surprising, it’s worth pointing out that this decision comes in the same week-long span that saw Trump cozying up publicly to renowned human rights violator Kim Jong-un; the administration’s blatant human rights violations at the border coming under increased condemnation; and Trump tweeting today using the genocidist language of “infestation” to describe immigrants. The administration doesn’t want to be part of the Human Rights Council because it actually just doesn’t believe in universally applicable human rights. That’s the long and short of it. Not everyone is deserving in their eyes.
Finally, this:
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson criticized the body’s perennial agenda item dedicated to Israel and the Palestinian territories, calling it “damaging to the cause of peace.” Nonetheless, he said the U.K. wasn’t “blind to the value of this council.”
Always good to be to the right of Boris Johnson.