U.S. Joins More Dictators on U.N. Human Rights Council

While the United States pours billions of dollars annually into the famously corrupt United Nations, the world body’s laughable Human Rights Council welcomes even more of the globe’s violators to its list of disgraceful members.

It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. For years the U.S. boycotted the U.N. Human Rights Council over the membership of the world’s worst human rights violators, but President Obama joined in 2009. This week the U.S. signed up for another three-year term on the panel, which includes renowned human rights violators like China, Cuba, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The world body also added more than a dozen new members this week, including several countries that are known for trampling on human rights. Among them are Venezuela, Pakistan and Kazakhstan. The U.N. welcomed them even though two vetting groups determined they were not qualified to serve based on the U.N.’s own voting records and domestic rights protections.

None of this seems to matter to the Obama Administration, which has kept a generous flow of taxpayer dollars into U.N. coffers. The famously leftist world body is primarily funded by Uncle Sam to the tune of 7-plus billion dollars a year, even though some members of Congress have called for an end to the madness. In fact, last year the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, introduced legislation to reform U.N. funding.

“We need a UN which will advance the noble goals for which it was founded,” the Florida congresswoman said when she introduced the bill. “Unfortunately, the current UN continues to be plagued by scandal, mismanagement, and inaction, and its agenda is frequently hijacked by rogue regimes which protect each other while targeting free democracies like the U.S. and Israel.”

Laughable human rights council aside, the U.N. has long been a pillar of corruption, fraud and mismanagement. Yet the U.S. gives the world body significantly more than any other nation—nearly $8 billion in 2010 alone—and there is no transparency, accountability or follow-up of any sort on how the cash is spent.

Who could forget the U.N.’s shameful oil-for-food program with Iraq? It was supposed to help the Iraqi people by allowing Saddam Hussein to sell oil on the world market in exchange for humanitarian goods, such as food and medicine. Instead, Hussein exploited the $64 billion program as thousands of companies paid the dictator illegal surcharges and kickbacks while the U.N. stood by. Read all about that from the independent committee assigned to investigate the oil-for-food scandal.

The U.N.’s fraud-infested contract division has also made headlines over the years for its shady deals. In fact, a few years ago the U.N. chief (Sanjaya Bahel of India) responsible for awarding billions of dollars in contracts to companies around the world, was sentenced to eight years in prison for accepting cash, real estate, wild parties and hookers as bribes.