CLAUDIA ROSETT: ON THE “SELF CRITIQUE” THE STATE DEPT. SENT TO THE UN
http://www.forbes.com/2010/09/03/barack-obama-united-nations-human-rights-opinions-columnists-claudia-rosett.html
Freedom’s Edge
Internationalism Run Amok
Claudia Rosett, 09.03.10, 12:30 PM ET
America was founded as a country where no citizen would ever have to submit to the will of a king, or any other brand of despot. But hey, that’s yesterday’s news. President Barack Obama’s administration is now submitting its own special selection of domestic policies and laws for review by the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose 47 members include such tyrannies as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Cuba and China.
Packaged as a 29-page report aiming to create “a more perfect union” in “a more perfect world,” this U.S. self-critique was sent by the State Department on Aug. 20 to the U.N. High Commissioner on Human Rights, in preparation for a formal review on Nov. 5 by the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva. A glaring feature of this report is its disparaging mention of Arizona’s new immigration law. This is the same law that Attorney General Eric Holder condemned in May without reading, and which the Obama administration is challenging in court. State is presenting this situation for review by the U.N., implying that Arizona is violating human rights with a law that has “generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world.”
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer registered her protest in an Aug. 27 letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking that the section on Arizona’s immigration law be removed from the report. Calling it “downright offensive” that Arizona law be offered up by the federal government for a “human rights” review by such U.N. members as Libya and Cuba, Brewer wrote: “The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional.”
Brewer is dead right about internationalism running amok, and she’s probably right that this is unconstitutional. But the problems with this scene go way beyond the federal abuse of Arizona. At the best of times, the U.N. is, in the words of the late Democratic New York Sen. and U.N. ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “a dangerous place.” The U.N. is not an honest parliament accountable to some higher law. It is a despot-infested collective that reports erratically to itself; a place of double standards, which routinely delivers to dictatorships a legitimacy they do not deserve, and which they in turn use to heap criticism, without penalty, on the U.N.’s chief sugar daddy, the United States. Any attempt at real oversight or enforcement of integrity at the U.N. has been pretty much a voluntary and thankless task, shouldered almost entirely by the U.S.–when it is has been shouldered at all.
President Obama’s approach to the U.N. is bringing us the worst possible variation on these themes. Rather than stand apart on principle where warranted, the Obama administration is increasingly stooping to become one of the gang–hoping for favors in return. Last year Obama overturned the Bush policy of bypassing the Human Rights Council as hopelessly corrupt. Under Obama, the U.S. became a member, promising to work from within. We’re now seeing what that means in practice. While gaining stature from the U.S. presence, the Council itself remains stubbornly tainted, recently welcoming Libya to its ranks; sidelining atrocities by some of the world’s worst tyrannies while focusing obsessively, as ever, on condemning the democratic state of Israel. But Obama has found a new use for this arrangement. He’s trying to enlist the Council to further his domestic agenda, with the State Department attempting an end-run that invites into the U.S. system of checks and balances such voices as those of China, Russia, Cuba and Cameroon; or at best, the pronouncements of Switzerland, Norway and France.
A stranger to the U.S. system, presented with this report, might reasonably conclude that the U.S. is a country in which progress in “human rights” is defined not as a matter of protecting individual rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but as a direct function of putting the federal government in charge of who gets what. Never mind that the free market is vital not only to America’s prosperity, but to its constitutional promise of liberty. Under such labels as “fairness and equality,” this document amounts to a turgidly written manifesto in which the Obama administration seeks praise from the U.N. Human Rights Council for “progress” in dismantling the capitalist system.
After an opening bit of lip service to “individual freedoms,” the report, along with lambasting Arizona’s immigration law, goes on to laud ObamaCare as making “great strides” for human rights–never mind that a majority of Americans did not want this regulatory Godzilla of a partisan health care bill. There is a laundry list of new affirmative action quotas, targeted federal grants, and pursuit of “freedom from want” via “social benefits” in which redistribution of wealth is required by law. And there are such items as a reprise of the case cited by Obama in his 2009 Cairo speech, in which the U.S. Justice Department defended the right of a Muslim girl to wear a head covering, or hijab. (This last is presumably to curry favor with Islamic countries, despite the reality that human rights violations in these places tend to involve the punishment of women who prefer not to wear the veil, or, in the case of Saudi Arabia, the full-body abaya).
Officially, this U.S. self-critique is part of a grand and theoretically even-handed process in which the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, since its “reform” in 2006, now engages in a “universal periodic review,” cycling through all 192 member states every four years. In answer to the requirement for a self-critique, America could have simply said no, or perhaps sent in a copy of the Constitution. Instead, this report marks its eager first submission.
If this sounds like an exercise in universal justice, it is anything but. This setup ignores crucial differences between free and unfree countries. Unfree countries have no reliable mechanisms for policing their own human rights violations. Their citizens are at the mercy of governments which rule not by consent, but by force. It was to address that problem that the U.N. originally set up a human rights body, which–sadly but predictably, given the U.N. system–has been repeatedly captured and corrupted by the violators.
Genuinely free and democratic countries, notably the U.S., have built-in mechanisms for policing themselves. It does their citizens no service to officially involve in that process a U.N. club of foreign governments, especially when that club brings with it the agendas of such states as Libya, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia or Cuba. For that matter, under U.N. rules, any U.N. member state may weigh in on these “human rights” reports, whether a member of the Human Rights Council or not. Iran, for instance, is not a member of the Human Rights Council. Nonetheless, while murdering its own dissidents, executing homosexuals, and calling for a second Holocaust, Iran’s government has weighed in on U.N. “human rights” reviews of countries such as Norway and the Netherlands, advising them to combat xenophobia and strengthen their rules against Islamophobia (advice which a U.N. database shows has been, in both cases, meekly “accepted.”)
Hillary Clinton’s State Department styles itself a “strong supporter” of this U.N. review process, describing it as “a unique avenue for the global community to discuss human rights around the world.” In that spirit, State has rejected the request of Governor Jan Brewer that Arizona’s immigration law be removed from the U.S. report to the U.N. On Monday a State Department spokesman told the press that Arizona’s law will remain up for discussion by the U.N. as “a model” to other nations of how America handles its human rights debates.
Have no doubt that the U.N. is, in its way, taking note of the opportunities this new U.S. “model” affords. While Obama and Clinton are opening the gates for the U.N. to officially pillory Arizona state law (and perhaps praise ObamaCare?), the U.N. General Assembly, mother ship of the Human Rights Council, is preparing for its annual opening in New York later this month. The proposed theme of the debate? “Reaffirming the central role of the United Nations in global governance.”
Claudia Rosett, a journalist in residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.
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