Hot Air
Ed Morrissey
June 5, 2017
Excerpt:
It won’t be the first time that the US has pulled out of the UN’s panel on human rights. Bush withdrew the US from its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, in 2005 for the same reasons that Trump and Haley propose to do so now. The inclusion of major human-rights abusers as council participants created an environment where it became awfully convenient to go after Israel rather than allow the UN to look at their own records. The UN recast the panel into its current form in 2006, but the Bush administration declined to take part in it as the reforms appeared insufficient. Barack Obama applied for full membership in early 2009.
At the time, then-Secretary General Ban Ki-moon applauded the move, because US membership would “help blunt the influence of some of the council’s most repressive members,” according to the Washington Post at the time. That seems like a strange admission, though; why not just bar the UN’s “most repressive members” from sitting on the panel in the first place? That way the US wouldn’t need to act as a balance, and the panel might actually generate some credibility on the issue.
More...
http://hotair.com/archives/2017/06/05/trump-pull-un-human-rights-council/