Global Archive

For months, the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council. Finally, on June 19, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, jointly announced that the United States was leaving the body, charging that it was a “protector of human rights abusers, and a cesspool of political bias” against Israel. On one level, it should not come as a surprise that President Donald Trump chose to exit yet another U.N. organization—last year, he ditched UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural body, over what his administration also called its “anti-Israel bias.” […]

Who can speak for the United Nations on human rights with any credibility these days? Last week, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that he wants an open competition to determine who will become the new U.N. high commissioner for human rights when the position becomes vacant this summer. This is an explosively sensitive portfolio. The high commissioner is historically one of the most recognizable U.N. officials after the secretary-general. The media treat whoever holds the post as a sort of modern-day moral oracle. The outgoing incumbent, Prince Zeid Raad al-Hussein of Jordan, has not shied away from this vocation. He has […]

Birthday parties can be moments for both celebration and introspection. While it may be fun to mark life’s milestones, they can inspire soul-searching about the meaning of aging. There were understandably mixed feelings at the United Nations last week, as the organization marked peacekeeping’s 70th birthday. The Security Council sent military observers to the Middle East in 1948 to supervise the end of the first Arab-Israeli war. Pedants can debate whether this represented the birth of peacekeeping—the interwar League of Nations had deployed multinational forces—but it was the first of over 70 U.N. missions that have become the organization’s trademark. […]