When Paris Celebrates the Bankruptcy of Human Rights

On Monday, July 27, at the United Nations Security Council, American diplomats stood up and walked out as the French ambassador began to speak. Ukraine was the item on the agenda that day. In Moscow and Tehran, they must have enjoyed the spectacle: two Western allies publicly turning their backs on one another in the very chamber where they sit in the name of collective security. None of our adversaries could have staged such an image. We handed it to them for free.

On July 25, France’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva posted a tweet. In English, complete with a hashtag: “The US used to be a beacon of human rights. Not anymore. Today, it stands alongside North Korea, Nicaragua, Mali & Russia, isolated. And the world no longer listens to it. #AmericaAlone”

The world, then, no longer listens to Washington. It would listen, by this logic, to the institution Paris had just rescued: the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, whose incumbent, Volker Türk, the General Assembly had renewed the previous day for another four years. The United States opposed the extension.

A word about the man French diplomacy was celebrating. According to a tally by the NGO UN Watch, which examined the first two years of his tenure, Volker Türk condemned the United States more often than China, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Qatar combined. He said nothing about Cuba, nothing about North Korea, nothing about Eritrea, nothing about Qatar. Yet he found fault with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Italy and France. In his few criticisms of China, he never mentioned the internment of more than one million Uyghurs, even though the UN itself concluded in 2022 that their mass detention might constitute crimes against humanity. Nor did he see fit to distance himself from Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur whose repeated statements have been condemned even in European capitals. On that matter, the UN’s highest-ranking human rights official had nothing to say.

Kenneth Roth, who led Human Rights Watch for thirty years and can hardly be suspected of pro-American sympathies, sums up the record in one word: a disaster.

Some will object that there is little Türk can do, that he inherited the institution. Perhaps. But that only makes matters worse.

The founding resolution of the Human Rights Council, the body that oversees the Office of the High Commissioner, requires its members to uphold “the highest standards” in human rights. China and Cuba have held seats on it for eighteen years, Qatar for seventeen. Russia and Saudi Arabia are regulars. A majority of its members are not classified as democracies by Freedom House. Only one country in the world appears automatically, at every session, as a permanent agenda item: Israel. Other countries are scrutinized only if a majority of states agrees, which happens rarely. At the General Assembly, Israel receives twenty times more condemnations each year than Iran, Syria and North Korea combined.

This selectivity has a cost, and it is not paid by the states it spares. An institution that singles out one country burns through the only capital it possesses: moral authority. The day it finally condemns Beijing, Tehran or Khartoum, its words carry no weight; that currency has already been spent elsewhere. The Uyghurs do not need another resolution on Israel. They need an institution that people still listen to.

One may regard American diplomacy as brutal and selective in its own right. It attacks the Council, sanctions the International Criminal Court and opposes Türk without restraint. But it is pointing to something real, and Paris knows it as well as Washington does. France chose cowardice and a cheap taunt.

Yet we should ask who pays the price. The next Uyghur sent to an internment camp, the next Iranian woman protester, the next Sudanese driven from his village will turn to an institution with nothing left to offer but a press release no one will read. In Beijing, Tehran and Moscow, they could ask for nothing more. Paris called it a victory.