House Moves to Cut Funds for UNDP, Human Rights Council

Each entity has recently brought particular discredit on itself, and in each case, there is a North Korea nexus. The UNDP recently failed a UN internal audit after U.S. diplomats outed the organization for allowing its Pyongyang operations to become, as a U.N. staffer put it, “an ATM machine” for the regime. It turns out that North Korea used some of the funds to buy overseas real estate and dual-use equipment, and that the U.N. even had a stock of counterfeit currency in one of its safes that handled North Korea program-related funds.

The U.N. Human Rights Council had completely failed to apply any consistent principles to the most grave human rights violations in the world, as I’ll explain in more detail below, because its members are some of the worst violators.

We’ll start with the UNDP, following the sequence of the press release from the Republican Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee:

(WASHINGTON) – An amendment to the State & Foreign Operations Appropriations Act that redirects $20 million in U.S. contributions to the UN Development Program for democracy and small business initiatives was approved today by the House of Representatives. A separate amendment to halt U.S. funding for the flawed UN Human Rights Council is expected to pass later today.

Drafted by U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the amendments reflect what she said was “palpable bipartisan frustration with the slow pace of UN reform and the alarming deterioration of the UN’s commitment to protect human rights around the world.”

[….]

“Rather than cooperating with U.S. officials in investigating these allegations, UNDP officials have circled the wagons and resorted to rhetorical denials in the press,” said Ros-Lehtinen. “The $20 million cut proposed in my amendment will send a clear signal about our demands and expectations for greater accountability from the UN Development Program, while also continuing to make a substantial contribution to UNDP’s core programs.”

The bad news is that the funds that are cut will be redirected to two other U.N. programs.

The Democracy Fund, an initiative proposed by President Bush in 2004, increases cooperation between democratic countries and supports new and transitional democracies. It has been successful in making grants to programs in more than 100 countries around the world to support civic education, voter registration, access to information, and democratic dialogue, among other things.

The Ros-Lehtinen amendment also would restore $6 million for the UN Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative. This initiative, modeled on the Democracy Fund, is designed to make technical assistance grants to promote positive environments for business and innovation around the world.

The House also finally acted against the U.N. Human Rights Council, about whose highly suspect membership I first blogged here. The Council was meant to be a reformed replacement for a predecessor body, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, whose credibility was irretrievably lost when Libya was allowed to chair it. Unfortunately, reforms in the Council have been a great disappointment, and as I noted here recently, the Council recently dropped its Special Rapporteurs for Cuba and Belarus, and was considering whether it should do the same in the case of North Korea.

Minutes of the most recent debate over condemning North Korea’s human rights record in the General Assembly will give you some idea of the politics. The usual suspects expressed a general opposition to “country-specific” resolutions, but naturally, they do not extend that principle to the United States or Israel. It was the moral equivalent ignoring gas chambers while issuing suspect accusations about flatulence in a crowded elevator.

A separate amendment which prohibits U.S. funds for the UN Human Rights Council is expected to pass later today also by voice vote.

Earlier this week, the Council, formed in 2006 to replace the failed UN Human Rights Commission, voted to end inquiries into human rights abuses in Cuba and Belarus and to make permanent its inquiry of the democratic state of Israel. By contrast, the Council has failed to condemn genocide in Darfur, the sprawling gulag of North Korea, political and human rights abuses in Cuba and Belarus, and bloody repression in Burma and Zimbabwe.

The action against Israel took place as news reports documented the horrific actions by Hamas against innocent Palestinians, including those in Gaza clamoring to enter Israel. The Ros-Lehtinen amendment prohibits U.S. contributions to the UN regular budget from being used for the nearly $15 million annual budget of the Council.

“We were right to refuse to dignify that poisonous talk-shop with our membership, and we must refuse to support it with our tax dollars,” said Ros-Lehtinen. “By pulling its membership from the broader UN General Assembly without any membership criteria, the Council has gone further than its predecessor in giving gross human rights violators the power to shape the international human rights agenda,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

There are two more links on the U.N./human rights story that you shouldn’t miss. One is this rather depressing but very enlightening Claudia Rosett narrative of the Council getting nothing done except to sustain its own existence. As a follow-up, Rosett snapped some pictures that illustrate vividly where your tax dollars went. The jobs that these officials should be doing were never intended to be paths to personal enrichment. It takes a unique kind of person to do this work with the dedication it demands, but from the looks of things, the U.N. member states didn’t send that kind of person to New York.

That things are working this way under a Democratic Congress is telling. First, you have to wonder why Republicans never made this move when they were in the majority in the case of the Human Rights Commission (the UNDP scandal is very recent). In some ways, the Republicans seem almost more effective now that they’re in a narrow minority.

The second point is that the Democratic leadership didn’t make an issue of this. The problem for the U.N. is that poll results like these transcend party lines. They can’t continue to have a hold on U.S. taxpayer funds when only the most liberal districts in New York and San Francisco would still fund them.

Some Anju Links:

* North Korea will execute four by firing squad in public. They’re accused of being “human traffickers,” but it’s likely they’re actually defection brokers who help people escape.

* When the regime runs out of rations for the people, it issues “ghost” rations.

* Here’s another in-depth portrait of a North Korean refugee’s difficult adjustment to life in the South. I’m no fan of Norimitsu Oniishi because he doesn’t get the big picture, but he does fine detail well.

* Forgotten War: Growing numbers of South Koreans have only the vaguest idea of who attacked who during the Korean War. That may have something to do with how badly the subject is being taught in Korean schools. In spite of the teacher’s union’s propaganda (see also 1, 2, 3, 4), views of the North are substantially less positive and more wary than they were five years ago.

There were also changes in the historical view of the Korean War. In December 2002, more opted for “a proxy war of the U.S. and the Soviet Union” (44.5 percent) than “an illegal invasion by North Korea” (31.2 percent). In the latest poll, more than a half opted for an illegal invasion by North Korea (52.3 percent), followed by a proxy war (35.7 percent). Among college students, the view that the war was an invasion increased sharply from 17.7 percent to 41.7 percent, while those seeing it as a proxy war declined from 67.2 percent to 54.7 percent. [Chosun Ilbo]