The idea that the best person to catch a thief is a thief has been explored in countless stories and films, from The Stainless Steel Rat to To Catch a Thief. It even has real-life counterparts: hackers have been recruited to participate in anti-hacking initiatives.
Still, those are the exceptions. It’s mostly pretty common sense not to hand criminals the keys to the bank. Nor would anyone seriously consider a serial killer’s opinions on ethics.
And only a lunatic or a thoroughly corrupt body would even for an instant consider a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy an expert on women’s rights.
But “lunatic” and “thoroughly corrupt” are redundant terms when it comes to the UN.
This is, after all, the body which elected China, Libya and a raft of other countries ranked near the very worst for human rights abuses to its Human Rights Council.
So it’s hardly surprising that the UN has elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women.
But what is disturbing is that at least four Western nations concurred with the vote.
Being the undemocratic institution that it is, the UN doesn’t apply the sort of transparency it demands of sovereign nations to itself. The UN’s vote was secret. But some groups have been doing the maths.
Although the voting was secret, the fact that Iran’s regime won 43 votes means that only 11 ECOCOC members did not vote for Iran. Therefore, at least four out of the 15 Western democracies did vote for Iran, and possibly more because the 11 countries that did not vote for Iran could be any of the 54 member states of ECOSOC[…]
The democracies who may have voted in the April 20, 2021 secret ballot for Iran’s misogynistic regime include Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, France, Latvia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
UN Watch called on lawmakers from the 15 EU and other democracies to demand that their governments reveal how they voted.
In 2017, after a similar secret ballot for the same UN women’s rights commission, a UN Watch campaign led to Belgium’s admission that it voted to elect Saudi Arabia, and to the revelation that the the Belgian government made sure to tell the Saudis that they voted for them.
Still, I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for anyone to come clean on this one in a hurry.
As human rights lawyer Hillel Neuer tweets:
Dutch lawmakers formally demanded their government answer if it voted to elect Iran to the UN women’s rights commission[…]
In the past, the Netherlands openly justified voting Iran onto a UN women’s rights committee. So they may well have done it.
German newspaper Bild also queried the German Foreign Office.
“The request has so far remained unanswered.“
Norway won’t say if voted Iran onto UN Women’s Rights Commission.
UN Watch
Secretively voting one of the world’s most misogynistic regimes onto a women’s rights committee. That’s the UN for you.
Remind me again why we should keep pretending that the UN has any moral authority?
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