Analysis
Can Britain fix the UN Human Rights Council’s anti-Israel strand?
Britain is not following the US out of the door, but its mission to strengthen the UNHRC from within is no easy task
June 20, 2018 13:52
1 min read
Britain is not following the US out of the door, but its mission to strengthen the UNHRC from within is no easy task
June 20, 2018 13:52The Trump administration has built a decent record of walkouts over the past year.
Last June, the US President announced plans to withdraw from the landmark Paris climate accord because the deal would undermine his country's economy. Then in October the US walked out of Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency Washington sees as anti-Israel.
This is a White House that is steadily disengaging from multilateralism, so it was not a huge surprise when Nikki Haley announced plans this week to leave the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
“For too long, the Human Rights Council has been a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias,” Ms Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said on Tuesday.
“The world’s most inhumane regimes continue to escape scrutiny, and the council continues politicizing and scapegoating of countries with positive human rights records in an attempt to distract from the abusers in their ranks.”
She was referring to the presence of such countries as Saudi Arabia, China and DR Congo among the council’s members.
As Ms Haley walks out of the council, though, Britain is staying firmly inside.
Countries need to talk to each other about human rights and the council is the “best tool available”, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said in a late-night statement on Tuesday, “to address impunity in an imperfect world and to advance many of our international goals.”
“We’ve made no secret of the fact that the UK wants to see reform of the Human Rights Council, but we are committed to working to strengthen the Council from within,” he added.
That will be especially hard when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Britain and the US have long complained that UNHRC meetings have a permanent slot – agenda item 7 – to discuss rights abuses in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.
No other part of the world has a dedicated fixture like this; earlier this week Mr Johnson called the practice “disproportionate and damaging to the cause of peace”.
But after 60 Palestinians were killed in clashes with the IDF across the Gaza border on a single day last month, it was the UNHRC that voted for a resolution that condemned Israel, made no mention of Hamas and sent a team to investigate human rights abuses in all Palestinian territories, not just Gaza.
Only two countries opposed it; the United Kingdom was not one of them. It said the motion was a “partial and imbalanced”, but opted to abstain.
It did not bode well for UK diplomacy or for Mr Johnson’s ambition to strengthen the council from within.
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