Brookings is Bonkers

Filed under: United Nations

An amazingly stupid op-ed piece from Ted Piccone, a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director for Foreign Policy at the left-wing Brookings Institution, recently appeared in the Washington Post.

Attempting to claim that human rights NGOs scored a victory by beating back an attempt by Egypt, one of the world's leading human-rights felons, to take over the chair of the United Nations' Human Rights Council

When African NGOs learned that Egypt was likely to run unopposed for the Council's presidency, they took action. Forty-two organizations in twenty countries wrote to all of the African heads of state, demanding that Africa be "represented in this role by a recognized human rights leader from our continent." Given Egypt's effective diplomacy at the United Nations, it was never likely that this NGO coalition would achieve much. But through a sophisticated advocacy campaign in democratic and democratizing countries, the NGOs convinced their governments not to support a potentially embarrassing and regressive African presidency.

The result was that Nigeria won the position. But Piccone himself admits that "Nigeria also has serious human rights problems. A failure of the rule of law in that country has fueled corruption, violence and persecution." That's a "human rights leader"? If so, dark days indeed are ahead for Africa.

And Piccone doesn't seem to realize that what actually transpired was only that the "real" African nations were whipped up into an anti-Arab hysteria directed at Egypt, with the result being no significant increase in pro-human rights activity or credibility by this much-maligned UN bureaucracy.

Piccone then chastises the Bush administration for spurning this sham entity, a totally ridiculous canard. If he were serious about human rights, rather than simply serious about creating vast new levels of bureaucracy which are adored by institutions of the left like Brookings, he would applaud Bush's move and then demand that he take real steps towards making the U.S. a leader in the human rights field, standing up to draconian nightmare states like Vladimir Putin's Russia. Putin is using the very bureaucratic mechanisms Piccone is defending to assist the the rape and slaughter of Zimbabwe's democracy, and the world is standing idly by letting it happen because the U.S. is not apparently prepared to instigate real opposition outside the comfy confines the the UN.

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