Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia are repressive regimes. They don’t belong on U.N. Human Rights Council | Opinion

It sounds like a joke, but, tragically, it’s not. The United Nations may soon elect Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia — three of the world’s most repressive regimes — to be full members of its top human-rights body.

While most of the world is focused on the COVID-19 crisis, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia have launched campaigns to win seats at the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council, based in Geneva.

U.N. experts tell me that, because of the way Council members are elected, there is a good chance that these countries will win seats.

The Human Rights Council is supposed to investigate human-rights abuses around the world. Its rotating member-countries are elected by the U.N.’s 193-country General Assembly, scheduled to hold a secret vote to elect 15 new Council members in October.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the Human Rights Council would include some of the bloodiest dictatorships as full-standing members.

Last year, the General Assembly elected Venezuela to the Council, ignoring the fact that dictator Nicolas Maduro’s death squads are responsible for more than 6,800 killings — most of them political — between early 2018 and mid 2019, according to the U.N.’s own High Commissioner for Human Rights, a separate agency.

Cuba, which has not held a free election in six decades, and Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy, have been Council members in recent years. They were forced to take a one-year break because, under Council rules, no member can serve more than six consecutive years.

Hillel Neuer, head of the Geneva-based independent watchdog group UN Watch, told me that both Cuba and Saudi Arabia have good chances of being elected.

“They’ve never lost an election for the Council,” Neuer said. “So if the past is a guide, they win.”

This is in part because, under U.N. rules, regional blocs at the U.N. separately elect three countries each for the Council’s membership elections. Then, the General Assembly generally rubber-stamps the regional groups’ decisions and votes for their picks.

So repressive regimes generally go out of their way to win seats at the Council because they want to stop U.N. investigations into their own human rights abuses.

Typically, countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia trade favors with democratic nations. For instance, Cuba will offer to campaign for democratic countries’ seats at U.N. economic commissions — which free countries are more interested in — in exchange for democracies’ support for a Cuban seat at the Council.

According to Neuer, of UNWatch, “To defeat Cuba, Washington and its friends must encourage a Costa Rica or another friendly democracy to run, and then Washington must lobby worldwide for countries to vote for that democracy.”

Problem is, President Trump has alienated America’s traditional European allies, and the United States has lost much of its international clout since Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Change Accord and abdicated much of the U.S. leadership on human-rights issues by embracing North Korea’s brutal dictator, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other autocrats without criticizing their human-rights abuses.

Trump has even refused to strongly condemn Saudi Arabia’s killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, was ordered from the Saudi presidential palace. Thus, in the eyes of most democracies, the Trump administration has little moral authority to lead a human rights-related campaign.

Still, the U.S. government should join with other world democracies in trying to stop new repressive regimes from joining the Council. Human-rights groups should step up their campaigns to stop this charade and to get Venezuela expelled from the Council.

A UN Watch petition named “Expel Maduro from the U.N. Human Rights Council” has already gathered more than 131,000 signatures on Change.org. It’s time to start an additional petition called: “Stop Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia from becoming members of the U.N. Human Rights Council.”

Let’s encourage Costa Rica or another democratic nation not currently on the Council to run against Cuba. Otherwise, the U.N.’s top human-rights body will be even more of a sham than it is now.

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