US envoy Haley berates UN rights council, demands reforms
GENEVA — U.S. President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday berated the U.N.’s top human rights body, calling it a “forum for politics, hypocrisy and evasion” that allows rights abusers to whitewash their images and foes of Israel to criticize the Jewish state unfairly.
Nikki Haley, in the first visit to the Human Rights Council by America’s top diplomat at the U.N., trained most of her focus on alleged abuses by Venezuela’s government, a relatively easy target in that President Nicolas Maduro has increasingly run afoul of some of his Latin American neighbours.
Haley made only a passing reference to poor human rights in Saudi Arabia, a longtime U.S. ally that recently agreed to buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-made weapons over the next decade. Many of the weapons could be used in the Saudi-led fight against rebels in impoverished, war-wracked Yemen.
After brief comments to the Human Rights Council, Haley used an academic forum in Geneva to pinpoint two reforms sought by the United States: the use of competitive elections to choose the council’s 47 members and removal of Israel as a permanent fixture on its agenda — the only country in the world that is.