The United Nations General Assembly elected China, Russia, Pakistan and Cuba to the organization’s Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for the 2021-2023 term on Tuesday, eliciting harsh criticism from countries that actually safeguard human rights.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan stated that the elections “prove once again that this council has nothing to do with protecting human rights and everything to do with violating them.”
He noted that since 2006, the UNHRC has adopted 90 resolutions condemning Israel, more than all the resolutions against Syria, North Korea and Iran, combined.
“The obsessive focus on Israel, along with its protection of oppressive, dictatorial regimes, shows that the Human Rights Council is in the business of white-washing the crimes of these countries,” he charged, calling on all democracies “that are still members of the council to immediately resign from this shameful and anti-Semitic body.”
Israel and the US withdrew from the UNHRC in 2018.
The UNHRC is infamously biased against Israel, with nearly half of its resolutions focused solely on the Jewish state, while completely ignoring war, strife and atrocities committed around the world.
Israeli leaders and officials have cited the UNHRC for its “obsessive hostility” toward Israel and its “one-sided mandate.”
Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of the UN Watch, said that the elections day “is a black day for human rights. The UN’s newest world judges on human rights include Pakistan, persecutes of Christians, Hindu, Ahmadis, China, which herded one million Uighurs into camps, Russia, which poisons dissidents, and Cuba, a police state.”
The UN Human Rights Council members include Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Qatar, Egypt, Cuba, China, Venezuela, Mauritania, Sudan and Libya.
US Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft said that the election results “validate President Donald Trump’s decision to leave that deeply corrupted body.”
“With China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela as members, the Council makes a mockery of its intended purpose and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” she stated.
The US “remains a leader in promoting human rights and protecting human rights defenders around the world. The Human Rights Council, by contrast, is a haven for despots and dictators, hostile to Israel, and ineffectual on true human rights crises,” she added.