Commentary and Newsletters

Anne Bayefsky

The UN and the Credibility of Tom Lantos

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

On Tuesday, November 21, 2006 the New York Times called the "reformed" UN Human Rights Council "a discredit to the United Nations" and commented "...the Human Rights Council [was] born earlier this year of a weak-kneed compromise from which the United States stood honorably apart."

By contrast, on April 6, 2006 Congressman Tom Lantos, soon to become the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, "expressed outrage at the Bush Administration decision...not [to] seek a seat on the United Nations' new Human Rights Council" because, he claimed, "the new Human Rights Council...is a clear improvement over the existing commission...".

Now Congressman Lantos is faced with the following incontrovertible record - predicted with precision by Ambassador John Bolton. Thirty percent of all the UN Human Rights Commission resolutions adopted over a forty-year period and critical of a specific states' human rights record were directed at Israel alone. In comparison, in five sessions since it first met in June of this year, the Council has directed one hundred percent of its human rights resolutions condemning a specific state towards Israel.

Will Chairman Lantos continue to blame America for UN-driven anti-Zionism and anti-semitism and refuse to recognize hate when it stares him in the face? Or will he encourage the necessary steps to distance the United States from the UN's lead human rights agency now so obviously foreign to everything we (and Congressman Lantos) hold dear?