The Trump Administration announced today that the United States is withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council. That’s good news for pro-life advocates as the so-called human rights organization pushed for a global right to kill unborn children in abortions.
The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, with U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley calling the 47-member council “a protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias.”
Haley noted the move came after a year where “we did not see any progress.”
Haley threatened the pull-out last year, citing longstanding U.S. complaints that the council showed a “chronic bias” against Israel. But the announcement also came just a day after the U.N. human rights chief denounced the Trump administration for separating migrant children from their parents.
“I want to make it crystal clear that this step is not a retreat from our human rights commitments. On the contrary. We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights,” she said. “We did not make this decision lightly. When this administration began 17 months ago, we were well aware of the enormous flaws in the Human Rights Council. We could have withdrawn immediately. We did not do that. Instead, we made a good faith effort to resolve the problems.”
Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the creation of the body when he served as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under President George W. Bush.
The so-called UN human rights group has a history of denying human rights to children before birth.
In 2012, the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva inched closer to asserting abortion as a human right when it passed a resolution endorsing a controversial new set of guidelines on maternal mortality. The guidelines were crafted with input from abortion advocates and reflect a view rejected by nations at the UN General Assembly.
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The resolution, sponsored by New Zealand, Burkina Faso, and Colombia, endorsed a “technical guidance” paper by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights that included abortion under the term “sexual and reproductive health rights.”
Council members opposing the resolution said, “A human rights-based approach to maternal mortality and morbidity has to respect the sovereignty of states . . . with full respect for the various religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds of its people, and in conformity with universally recognized international human rights” which so far does not include abortion.
The UN Human Rights Council also castigated Ireland for its pro-life laws protecting unborn babies from abortion.
Penny Nance, CEO and President of Concerned Women for America, praised the move in comments to LifeNews.
“The United Nations’ dedication to defending human rights has strayed so far from its conception post-World War II when President Harry Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt to the first American delegation to the U.N.,” she said. “Today the UNHRC itself is a remake of its predecessor, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which had to be replaced because it valued partisan politics above human beings. History is nothing if not repetitive, and today the UNHRC is facing the same fate as the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The United States is willing to call it what it is.”
Nance added: “The United States has asked the Council to face its hypocrisy. We have asked that they expel nations who are blatant human rights abusers, such as Venezuela, China, and Saudi Arabia. Ambassador Haley put forth minimum requirements for the United States’ involvement, and all of them have been ignored. It is not our obligation to align ourselves with an international body that claims to stand for human rights but cherry picks which humans deserve those rights.”
