"The United Nations cares about human rights so much that it has ten organizations working on human-rights-related issues. One of these is the UN Human Rights Council, the organization from which the U.S. withdrew Tuesday because of, among other things, its 'chronic bias against Israel,' to quote Nikki Haley, the U.S. envoy to the UN.
Haley has a point. The Council's rules single out Israel for scrutiny of its actions in the occupied Palestinian territories. No other country is similarly named. The broader problem, however, are the countries doing the scrutinizing: countries like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Ethiopia.
The members of the 47-nation Council, who are elected for three-year terms by the UN General Assembly, are chosen geographically: Africa and Asia each get 13 seats; Latin America and the Caribbean get eight; Western Europe and others, which includes the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, get seven; and Eastern Europe gets six.
Although this geographical quota system addresses the disparities in global representation, it is also the Council's most serious flaw. With a few honorable exceptions, the overwhelming majority of countries outside the Western Europe and others grouping have flawed-to-abysmal human-rights records and policies. Many are not democracies. Few have representative governments. Fewer still have an incentive to pursue and commit to universal human rights.
That these are the countries that criticize Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is bad enough; that they do it while pursuing their own draconian policies makes the membership laughable..."