UN Human Rights Council 2017: Almost 1 in 4 Members Abuse Human Rights
(CNSNews.com) – The United States is expected to return to the U.N. Human Rights Council in this new year, rejoining a body almost a quarter of whose members are autocracies with poor human rights records.
When the HRC holds its first session of 2017 next month – the 34th since its establishment in 2006 – 11 of its 47 members (23.4 percent) will be countries whose records on political rights and civil liberties have earned them a “not free” annual grading from Freedom House, the veteran Washington-based rights watchdog.
Another 15 members (31.9 percent) of the U.N.’s top human rights apparatus have records that earned them a “partly free” rating from Freedom House.
That leaves just 21 members determined by Freedom House to be “free.” Those democracies – about half in the West and the rest scattered across Latin America, Africa and Asia – comprise just 44.6 percent of the total membership, the third-smallest proportion of free democracies of any year in the council’s history.
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