#Team Biden’s foolish rush to rejoin the UN tyrants’ club

President Biden’s obsession with rapidly reversing his predecessor’s policies has him doing something he constantly accused his predecessor of doing: giving legitimacy to murderous dictators.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced this week that Washington will “reengage immediately and robustly” with the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, from which former President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018. American representatives will seek full membership in the council’s elections in October.

The New York Times calls the UNHRC “the world’s most important human-rights body,” but “the world’s most corrupt human-rights body” would be more apt. Its 47 members include egregious human-rights violators, and they use their position to gaslight their citizens and the world about their misdeeds — and even get opportunities to condemn Western democracies as the real abusers.

Why would America want to work with an organization ostensibly devoted to improving human rights but dominated by the likes of China, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela?

Blinken agrees that the body “is flawed and needs reform,” but he claims addressing its “deficiencies” requires America “at the table, using the full weight of our diplomatic leadership.” He says the council “can serve as an important forum for those fighting injustice and tyranny” — that is, “when it works well.”

But when has it ever worked well?

Trump’s withdrawal wasn’t a norm-overturning step made by an unprecedented president. When the council was created in 2006 to replace the UN Human Rights Commission, President George W. Bush declined to join, and he was prescient: The new body wound up replicating the same problems that had led to the dismantling of the old, which was a “club of abusers,” as NPR put it.

President Barack Obama, however, decided to “reengage,” because it’s “vital” to “have a seat at the table,” John Kerry, his secretary of state, said. Sound familiar? But there is zero evidence of reform during the Obama years.

Take UNHRC’s obsession with condemning Israel, even as it ignores deadly dictatorships. Indeed, the body’s only permanent agenda item is Israel, and it has passed more resolutions censuring the Jewish state than it has for the rest of the world combined. It has also created eight commissions of inquiry into Israel — and just one into North Korea.

Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared in the council’s 2011 opening session that its “structural bias against Israel” is “wrong” and “undermines” its work. But if the council ignored similar complaints from two UN secretaries-general, Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon, and its own president, Doru Costea — and it did — why would it change for Clinton?

Later that year, Richard Falk, the council’s special rapporteur on “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” posted an anti-Semitic cartoon on his blog. The United States, calling it “shameful and outrageous,” demanded Falk resign. He served out his six-year term, which ended in 2014.

There is simply no reforming a body that gives evildoers equal footing with free nations. The UN resolution establishing the council states members “shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights” — yet more than half aren’t even democracies, garnering Freedom House ratings of “not free” or “partly free.”

While the United States had a seat at its table, Saudi Arabia’s Faisal bin Hassan Trad was elected chair of the council’s advisory committee. That was in 2015, the same year Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, greeted with a standing ovation, delivered a 40-minute speech full of lies, with replies not permitted.

When, in 2019, 22 countries signed a letter to the council demanding China close its Xinjiang concentration camps, where at least a million Uyghurs have been interned, 50 countries responded by complimenting the Beijing regime’s “remarkable achievements in Xinjiang.”

Mutual backslapping among tyrants might not even be the most tragicomic council activity. Last month, North Korea — run for decades by a totalitarian dynasty — was given the floor to tell Australia “to cease cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment in public places of detention” and “ensure” that disabled persons can participate “in elections on an equal basis with others.”

Why give America’s imprimatur to a body that makes a mockery of freedom? It’s as laughable as Biden’s reversal of Trump’s terrorist designation of Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels days before asking them to . . . stop their terrorism. An anti-Trump-centered foreign policy is no real policy at all.

Twitter: @KJTorrance