"At long last, the United States is leaving the United Nations Human Rights Council - a morally corrupt U.N. organ that flagrantly betrays the ideal it supposedly upholds. The council has been a microcosm of the U.N.'s fundamental moral bankruptcy.
Even as we should cheer the Trump administration's decision to step away from it, we must demand even more from the U.N.: a principled commitment to individual rights.
The U.N.'s Human Rights Council is infamous for serving the agenda of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes - while obsessively rebuking one particular free society that actually upholds rights, Israel...
What lends the U.N.'s Human Rights Council a shred of legitimacy is the participation of a few better, freer member nations - principally, the United States. So it's good that Trump administration has withdrawn.
But the problems of the Human Rights Council reflect the U.N.'s fundamental vice. A defining feature of the U.N. has been its policy of opening membership non-judgmentally to all nations, whether free or oppressive, peaceful or belligerent. This amoral neutrality is supposed to make evil regimes better. In fact, it enables and abets their violation of individual rights. U.N. membership did not prevent the USSR from herding its citizens into forced-labor camps, murdering untold numbers of them, and invading other states. Nor China from crushing under its military boot pro-freedom demonstrators at Tiananmen Square and peaceful ideological dissenters. The list goes on.
And the U.N. has long provided a global stage for dictators and theocrats to justify and launder their crimes: Iran's Hassan Rouhani, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Cuba's Fidel Castro. Etc. By elevating such vicious tyrants to the dignity of statesmen, the U.N. gave them moral cover...
The Trump administration was right to withdraw from the U.N. Human Rights Council. But to truly uphold the principle of rights, the U.S. itself needs to take seriously the moral difference between freedom and tyranny. A start would be to recognize the vicious character of the dictators and tyrants whom the U.N. enables."