Has the UN hit rock bottom?

Stephen Pollard I 15 March 2025 I Spectator World

The word ‘surreal’ barely does justice to what’s been happening in recent weeks. Quite apart from the possible collapse of Nato and the US treating Canada as more of an enemy than Russia, there was the previously unthinkable sight last month of the US voting alongside North Korea, Belarus and, yes, Russia at the United Nations against most of its (former?) allies.

But while it was unprecedented for the US to cast such a vote, perhaps the best way to view it was as the US at last entering into the true spirit of the UN. Because for the UN, the surreal is the norm.?Last week, for example, Saudi Arabia took its place as the chair – elected unopposed – of ?the UN’s?women’s rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW), for a session which sits until 21 March.?Have a guess which country would be the single least appropriate nation on earth to chair such a body. Yes: the new chair of the UNCSW is Saudi Arabia, in which women remain subject to a form of enslavement under the recodified male guardianship system, which came into Saudi law on – you couldn’t make this up – International Women’s Day in 2022. Described by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a ‘leap’ forward, under Saudi law a man must approve even the most basic activities conducted by a woman.

In 2024 Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University PhD student, was sentenced to six years in prison for her social media posts – a sentence then?increased to 34 years, ?then reduced to 27 years, then to 4 years – and then last month she was released, while Nourah al-Qahtani?was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Fitness instructor Manahel al-Otaibi was sentenced to 11 years for posting photos of herself without an abaya and for advocating an end to the guardianship system.

As the superb organisation UN Watch points out,?the UNCSW has never passed a single?resolution regarding?Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women – and now, grotesquely, has rewarded it with the chair. Nor has it criticised Yemen, which ranks at the bottom of the gender equality index and where child marriage is the norm, with two-thirds of girls married before they are 18. The Democratic Republic of Congo, known as the rape capital of the world, has had not a syllable of criticism from the UNCSW. Nor Iran, where discrimination against women is enshrined in law and where women are routinely punished if they flout the modesty laws.

But astonishing as it may seem that the chair of the UN’s women’s rights body is one of the most misogynistic nations on earth, this is par for the course for the UN.

This special representative, currently Francesca Albanese, is mandated to investigate ‘Israel’s violations’ of international law –?and only Israel’s. Ms Albanese has a habit of coming out with anti-Semitic statements such as ‘America is subjugated by the Jewish lobby’ and reportedly telling a Hamas conference in 2023: ‘You have a right to resist.’

Take its Human Rights Council’s social forum, which was until recently chaired by Iran, and the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) itself. The UNHRC has passed not one resolution?on any?human rights abuses in Algeria, China, Cuba, Egypt or Gaza, Iraq, or Zimbabwe. It does, however, have a standing order to debate a resolution against Israel at least once per session, the only country subject to such a standing order. Israel has been condemned in at least four resolutions every year since?at least 2006. Since the Human Rights Council was created, it has held one special session on Libya, one on Iran, three on Myanmar, five on Syria and nine on Israel. And in May 2021 the UNHRC set up its only permanent Commission of Inquiry into – of course – Israel, with a Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

More egregious still, of course, is UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East). UNRWA’s links to Hamas have now been fully exposed, such as that between 1,200 to 1,500 employees of UNRWA are?linked to?Hamas or?Palestinian?Islamic Jihad.

Last year UN Watch exposed a Telegram chat group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers,?many?celebrating 7 October, and the identities of dozens of UNRWA staff who participated were revealed. The IDF has uncovered a network of tunnels underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters.

The reality is that for all the good intentions of its founders, the UN has become one of the most poisonous organisations on earth, the mechanism through which racists, misogynists and tyrants further their causes. It should be regarded not as the fulcrum of global diplomacy but as a vehicle through which lies, propaganda and hatred are given the imprimatur of legitimacy.

Author: Stephen Pollard