Obama and the UN Human Rights Council: No Change Coming

Brett Schaefer / September 15, 2009

One of the early decisions the Obama Administration made to differentiate itself from the “unilateralist” Bush Administration was to announce that the U.S. would run for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council. The Council was created in 2006 to replace the hugely discredited U.N. Commission on Human Rights that had failed to reliably confront governments that violated the rights of their citizens, allowed human rights abusers to sit on the Commission for the sole purpose of blunting its effectiveness, and demonized Israel at every opportunity.

In 2006, despite strong criticism of the Commission, the Bush administration was one of a handful of countries to vote against the resolution creating the Council. It did so because it feared that the Council lacked the safeguards to prevent it from repeating the mistakes of the Council. The record of the Council supports this conclusion. In its first three years, the Council has performed as poorly, perhaps even worse than, the Commission it replaced. The Bush administration rightly distanced the U.S. from the Council. (more…)