United Nations

Its failure to rein in North Korea lays bare our anarchic global order

Crises are engulfing international politics, most recently with Russia’s blatant disregarding of international law in Ukraine and with North Korea’s consistent breaching of the nuclear non-proliferation norm. But at a time when states are acting outside of the rules-based system, our main forum for regulating these violations, the UN, is demonstrating its limited power to enforce or control rogue behaviour.

Rather than talking about ousting Putin, the hypocritical, useless Council, filled with human rights abusers, should abolish itself

An investigation by Israeli experts reveals that Chinese authorities are killing prisoners in “re-education camps” to take their organs and sell them for transplantation to local and foreign clients. Ethan Gutmann, a researcher and human rights activist, said last week that China kills 25,000 people every year in Xinjiang to have their organs removed. Customers are mainly wealthy Chinese. But there are also “organ tourists”, from South Koreans to Gulf Muslims. Rabbis in Israel have banned going to China for transplants.

Wouldn’t that be enough, along with all the other dossiers concerning the Chinese regime, to ask for an investigation by the UN Human Rights Council, which has just been called upon to expel Russia?

Israel understands that the United Nations is a broken institution that helps sow chaos, terror and injustice. It knows that because it’s so often on the receiving end.

It’s taken the horrors in Ukraine for people to begin to register that a central pillar of world affairs since the Second World War has crumbled. Even now, though, the full implications aren’t acknowledged.

As evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine has mounted, the U.N. General Assembly has now voted to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

But the council has long been a vicious joke. Serial human-rights abusers, including such states as China, Cuba, Pakistan, Libya and Venezuela, are currently members.

Jew-hatred can only be acknowledged when it carries a tiki torch

António Guterres, the UN’s secretary-general, has described rising anti-Semitism as a ‘multi-headed monster’ of intolerance that’s creating a ‘tsunami of hatred’ across the world, and the UN proclaims ‘anti-racism’ as its defining ideology. But the UN is failing to confront discrimination and violence against Jews — and at times even nurturing it.