The UN resembles a bad joke after latest daft appointments
Congratulations to Saudi ambassador, Abdulaziz Alwasil, for being elected this week to chair the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The CSW has a mandate to promote women’s rights and gender equality around the world. Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that Abdulaziz is a man’s name and be aware that Saudi Arabia is a country with a terrible record of discrimination against women.
In a sterling week for the UN’s long record of striving to look ridiculous, its special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, produced a scathing report accusing Israel of acts of genocide in Gaza. This is the same Albanese who is on record as believing that America has been “subjugated by the Jewish lobby”.
The UN is suffering from declining relevancy. This week shows why. If its decision-making processes are seen to be political, if various sub-bodies are captured by interest groups, and if it allows clearly biased people to represent it, then the whole institution will continue to be taken less seriously as each year passes.
Ambassador Alwasil was not elected to his post. He was “endorsed”. Saudi Arabia had lobbied for the position, hoping to burnish any modernizing credentials it has. The job is rotated among the CSW’s five regional groups, usually without a vote, and none of the 45 member countries were prepared to create a precedent and go against the convention of unanimous approval. The outgoing chair, Antonio Manuel Lagdameo asked a meeting of the 45 if there were any objections and then said “I hear no objection. It is so decided.”
No objections despite Saudi Arabia being ranked 132nd out of 146 countries in the World Economic Forum 2023 report on gender equality. So, Mr Alwasil will now oversee the agenda for advancing women’s rights over the next 12 months.
He will point to his country’s 2018 decision to allow women to drive and the 2022 “personal status law” to show the progress being made back home. There have indeed been advances, for example it is no longer compulsory for women to cover their hair. However, this progress is severely limited. A woman cannot travel without a male guardian. She needs permission from a male relative to marry. She must obey her husband in a “reasonable manner”. A refusal to have sex with her husband allows him to withdraw financial support from her. Most of these restrictions were enshrined in the 2022 law which Riyadh touts as evidence of liberalism.
Failing to prosecute “honour crimes” and several legal cases of women being jailed for advocating for women’s rights on social media platforms are among the reasons why it is ranked so low. The Saudi mission to the UN feels this is unfair, telling Human Rights Watch that: “Women empowerment is a collective aim of the international community … the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has taken major steps…”
Francesca Albanese also feels hard done by when accused of prejudice. She is an Italian lawyer appointed by the UN’s Human Rights Council to the unpaid position of special rapporteur. It is an independent post, and she does not speak for the UN, but that is a nuance usually missing when her reports are publicized.
In this week’s report “Anatomy of a Genocide” she writes: “The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group.” She also says there is an attempt to “legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people” and that this is part of a “settler colonial” process.
The above may or not may be the case but it is not for Albanese, using the imprimatur of the UN, to declare a country guilty of genocide, or use loaded language such as “settler colonial”. The former is for an international court to rule on, and the latter is for the world of activists.
And activist is what Albanese appears to be. But, to become a special rapporteur, an applicant is supposed to be objective, free of politicization and to act with “impartiality, equity, honesty and good faith.” She told the UN she did not “hold any views or opinions that could prejudice the manner” in which she would carry out her position.
However, a few years previously, she posted on Facebook: “America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby, and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust…”. The former UNWRA employee had also described Jews in Israel as “foreigners” and compared Israel to the Nazis. She has expressed support for the EU taking Hamas off its terror blacklist and she does not accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Definition of antisemitism.
Asked about the “Jewish lobby” remarks, she told The Times of Israel, via email, that: “Some of the words I used, during Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2014, were infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive,” adding, “I distance myself from these words, which I would not use today, nor have used as a UN Special Rapporteur.” Perhaps she would not, but there has not been a full apology and the UN chiefs who signed off on her appointment appeared untroubled by remarks reflecting a worldview based on believing that Jews wield power over countries. Not just countries – the media as well. This was (pre-current position) Albanese on the BBC: “The Israeli lobby is clearly inside your veins and system”.
The case can be made that everyone deserves a second chance, but that is different to arguing that someone who has displayed such overt and offensive bias on an extremely sensitive subject, should then be appointed to report on it.
The UN does itself no favours in appointing such divisive figures, nor in “electing” countries to lead groups to further equality which themselves have abysmal track records. It’s been going on for years and there are numerous examples although perhaps few as hollowly laughable as when Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya was elected to chair the UN’s most august rights body, the Human Rights Commission, in 2003. To distance itself from the farce, the name was later changed to the Human Rights Council.
But name changes won’t change perceptions that the UN is failing to live up to its aims. The organization is the sum of its parts, but some of the parts are a bad joke.
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