While praising the Biden administration for supposedly making progress bringing the United States into compliance with United Nations agreements by promoting abortion, gun control, and transgenderism, the UN “human rights” bureaucracy released a scathing report last week slamming America as a bastion of horrors.
In the UN’s crosshairs: free-speech rights, state-level restrictions on killing babies, state efforts to protect children from genital mutilation, and the use of the death penalty on murderers. All that and more came under attack by the UN “human rights” machinery as supposed “human rights” violations. The global organization even called for the United States to change its Constitution to comply with UN schemes.
The controversial UN report, released by the UN “Human Rights Committee” on November 3, examined whether government at all levels in the United States was complying with the largely unconstitutional commitments in the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The global agreement, ratified by the U.S. government in 1992, purports to commit the U.S. government to usurp a broad array of powers that were never delegated to it in the Constitution that created it.
One of the most troubling elements of the report from a constitutional perspective is that it ignored the fact that most of the legal areas in question are under state rather than federal jurisdiction. Under America’s Constitution, which remains the supreme law of the land regardless of any treaties or statutes contradicting it, states only delegated a few clearly defined powers to the feds. All other powers were reserved for the states or the people, as explained clearly in the Tenth Amendment.
And yet, throughout the report, the UN acts as if the federal government can and must simply force states to obey, as if they are mere administrative units of an all-powerful unitary state beholden to the UN. The global outfit even lashed out against key constitutional procedures including state-level redistricting. It slammed constitutionally protected, God-given rights including freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms, too, calling for the government to crack down on both.
The UN committee started off by praising the U.S. government for what it described as “Positive Aspects.” These “positive” developments include the “Respect for Marriage Act” enshrining so-called homosexual marriage into federal statute, along with executive orders from Joe Biden promoting contraception and abortion. Also “positive”: racist “racial equity” and transgender-bathroom-at-school executive orders. Each one of the “positive” aspects is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution.
But the negatives far outweighed the positives, in the UN’s view. “The Committee remains concerned at the lack of measures to effectively incorporate the Covenant in the domestic legal order,” the report said, demanding that the “State Party” (the U.S. government) incorporate the UN dictates at the federal, state, and local level. The document also called for judges and prosecutors to rely on the global agreement while demanding that the U.S. government accept the UN’s interpretation of the Covenant.
Another key demand was that the U.S. government establish an independent “human rights” body to enforce the UN agreement across the United States. One of the purposes of this institution would be to punish speech that the UN considers to be “hate speech,” a concept developed by the mass-murdering Soviet dictatorship, and to censor internet speech the UN hates.
Perhaps even more startling, the UN demanded that the United States change its Constitution and pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which went down to defeat thanks to the efforts of conservative leaders such as Phyllis Schlafly. “The State party should redouble its efforts to guarantee protection against sex and gender-based discrimination in its Constitution, including through initiatives such as the Equal Rights Amendment,” the UN committee said.
The UN also demanded that the U.S. government take more action against states that are working to protect children from surgical genital mutilation known as “gender-affirming care.” It called for ensuring that men be allowed to use the bathroom with girls. And it demanded that males be allowed to compete in women’s sports as well.
The mass slaughter of the unborn must continue unimpeded, too — and with tax money. Among other concerns, the UN said it was “alarmed at the increase of legislation, barriers and practices at the state level that impede women’s access to safe and legal abortion, inter alia, the criminalization of various actors linked to their role in providing or seeking abortion care, including health care providers.”
With no trace of irony, in the very same section the UN committee also claimed it was “deeply concerned” about the “profound impact” that measures reining in the mass killing of unborn children would have on “the rights of women and girls seeking an abortion, including the rights to life, privacy and not to be subject to cruel and degrading treatment.” How not being allowed to kill one’s baby could be considered a threat to the “right to life” was not made clear.
The UN committee provided a broad list of specific demands surrounding abortion. These include making sure that all women and girls can kill their pre-born babies with tax funding and without legal restrictions of any kind. The report also called for the U.S. government to work on “harmonizing” its abortion policies with the “Abortion Care Guidelines” from the scandal-plagued World Health Organization (WHO).
On guns, the UN committee praised the Biden administration’s efforts to infringe on the rights enshrined in the Second Amendment, but called for far more infringements. Among other demands, the UN called for forcing everyone to obtain government permission to acquire firearms, magazines, or ammunition. It also demanded bans on broad categories of commonly owned firearms, and proposed helping to bankrupt the gun industry by subjecting it to endless litigation.
The “climate change” narrative featured prominently in the report, too. The UN committee called on the U.S. government to “intensify efforts to prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change and environmental degradation, including by strengthening its legal framework, and take adequate steps to adopt a precautionary approach to protecting persons, especially the most vulnerable, from the negative impacts of climate change and natural disasters.”
Even with over eight million immigrants surging across the border since Biden took over, the UN said the U.S. government needs to do more to open its borders even wider. In particular, slamming the “Muslim ban” under Trump, the report made clear that Islamic migration into the United States must be stepped up. “The State party should take all measures necessary to enhance protection of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, without discrimination,” the report concluded, calling for U.S. immigration law to be brought “in line with” international demands.
Some of the “human rights” violations identified in the UN report are in fact genuine violations of God-given rights. For instance, the committee blasted the U.S. government’s mass-murder-via-drone program that has slaughtered enormous numbers of innocent people around the world without even a trial, much less a conviction and death-penalty sentence.
The report also called for prosecutions of CIA and military personnel involved in torture, which is already required under state and federal statutes. And it expressed concern at “reports of the high number of children who are separated from their families and placed in child welfare facilities,” a crime of staggering proportions that has long been incentivized financially by the U.S. government.
All of those are valid and legitimate concerns. However, constitutionally speaking, they can and must be addressed domestically. And of course, each of those genuine violations identified by the UN — torture, kidnapping children from parents without due process, and assassinations — is already a flagrant violation of the federal and state constitutions as well as statutory law. There is no need for the UN to get involved.
The controversial report came right as the dictator-dominated UN “Human Rights Council” was facing global scandal for appointing the Iranian regime to chair its “Social Forum.” The mullahs ruling over Iran have been funding terror organizations such as Hamas while ruthlessly persecuting Christians and dissidents.
As this magazine has been documenting for decades, the “dictators club,” as the UN is known to critics, has a long track record of allowing mass-murdering regimes to hold prominent posts. And the UN has also been bullying Western governments to shred the remaining liberties of citizens, including the most basic and fundamental rights such as speech and the press, almost since its inception.
That is partly because the UN pushes a perverted concept of “human rights” — “rights” that are purportedly defined and granted by governments, treaties, and international organizations. Even more troubling, the UN-granted rights can be restricted or abolished by government at will under virtually any pretext, as the UN’s own “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” openly admits.
Consider Article 29 of the declaration, which claims that “everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”
Separately, it states that “rights and freedoms” may “in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.” For perspective, that would be like the First Amendment saying Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, unless that speech is being used to criticize Congress or otherwise makes Congress unhappy.
Obviously, the two views on human rights are incompatible at a basic level. The two visions are almost opposites. They cannot coexist. This is clearly evidenced by the fact that mass-murdering barbarians and tyrants of all varieties preside over the UN’s own “human rights” bureaucracies while constitutionally protected rights given to human beings by God are routinely derided and attacked by the UN system itself.
Still, domestic left-wing extremists involved in urging the UN to attack Americans celebrated the UN’s screed against the U.S. system. “The United States touts itself as a beacon of democracy and human rights, yet the committee’s findings prove that this could not be further from the truth,” argued Jamil Dakwar, director of the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) “Human Rights Program.”
According to Dakwar, whose organization was founded by card-carrying members of the Communist Party, the UN criticism of the U.S. system highlights the supposed “critical need to prioritize and strengthen human rights at home.” The ACLU was one of over 140 radical left-wing groups purporting to represent “U.S. civil society” that had “urged” the UN to “hold the U.S. government accountable” for alleged violations of the unconstitutional ICCPR regime.
As part of complying with that agreement, the ACLU’s Dakwar also echoed the UN call for the establishment of “a national human rights institution to ensure that our most basic rights are protected.” Similar schemes have been used in many states and nations to violate constitutionally protected rights and to terrorize Christians for refusing to celebrate homosexuality or gender confusion by, for example, baking cakes for homosexual “weddings.”
“It is critical that the U.S. government take this opportunity to heed the United Nations’ recommendations and deliver on behalf of the American people — including immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, women and girls, LGBTQ+ people, incarcerated people, Indigenous people, and other marginalized communities that are disproportionately impacted by the government’s continued violations,” Dakwar continued.
The U.S. government “must adopt a plan of action and concrete measures to address the large-scale rights violations identified by the committee, which cause harm to millions of people in the U.S. and those under its jurisdiction or those impacted globally by its actions and policies,” he continued, again listing a whole range of critical theory-inspired “group” designations that communists, globalists, and their useful idiots are using to divide and conquer American society.
The latest UN attack on the United States comes as more and more high-profile voices call for defunding the global organization or even withdrawing from it altogether. Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, just called for defunding the UN until it accepts fundamental reforms. And failing that, he called for the creation of a new international organization consisting of “law-abiding democracies who can be relied upon to uphold the principles we hold most dear.”
“It is fair to say that we Americans are stunningly generous to a bureaucratic, corrupt organisation which is often functionally pro-terrorist (look at UN officials in Lebanon and Gaza for example) and overwhelmingly rejects our values on issues such as the barbarism of Hamas,” wrote Gingrich in his November 2 piece for the U.K. Telegraph.
Gingrich, often derided by conservatives for being a “neocon,” called on other governments to join the United States in withholding funds from the UN until it submits to reform. “Since 12 democracies donate 60 per cent of the United Nations assessments, they should band together to force real change by simply withholding their annual dues until the system is reformed,” he said.
Fox News host Sean Hannity also upped his criticism. “I’ve said this for some time because of the anti-Americanism, the vitriol and anti-Semitism,” he declared on his program two weeks ago. “It’s time, frankly, as far as I’m concerned, for the UN to be evicted from America. They’re an anti-American organization. They serve no purpose.”
To read the rest of the article, visit The New American magazine.
The UN; almost as useless as its predecessor, the League of Nations. Can we just “deport” the UN body? Move em to Belgium or Luxemborg.
United Nations: Anti-American propaganda tools, as is the MSM.
WE taxpayers are tired of funding 90% of their operations!!
Sen them Home.