Expel Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council?

T he U.N. Human Rights Council voted Monday to hold a meeting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — but a meeting won’t take place until at least Thursday. The council’s president said he wanted to ensure that the emergency meeting would be “as non-disruptive as possible to the program of work.”

That delay will play out against a brutal backdrop: Moscow is quickly adapting to recent military setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine by dialing up its use of violence against civilians. The Ukrainian government has for days pointed to instances in which Russian forces targeted hospitals, ambulances, and kindergartens since the outset of the invasion. On Monday, Russian troops shelled civilian areas in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, killing eleven people, and there’s ample evidence indicating that Russian forces are deploying destructive cluster munitions and vacuum bombs. The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, said Monday that it is opening an investigation into likely war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The council sees fit to prioritize its current agenda at the expense of responding to a rapidly unfolding crisis. Expectations that the council can do much were extremely low to start with, not least because China and Russia each won election to the body in 2020 — and not for the first time. This week, their delegates teamed up with those of Cuba, Eritrea, and Venezuela to oppose even holding an urgent meeting on Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine. While they didn’t succeed in blocking the debate, the council isn’t capable of acting urgently, anyway.

The membership of these dictatorships in the Human Rights Council is one of the reasons the Trump administration withdrew from it in 2018, arguing that America’s continued participation would grant legitimacy to an irredeemable entity. In February 2021, President Biden decided to pursue and win a three-year term, beginning in 2022, as a member of the council. Critics have pointed out that while Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other officials promised to seek reforms to the council, these reforms remain elusive.

Nikki Haley, the Trump-era U.N. ambassador who led Washington’s departure from Geneva, hit the Biden administration for returning and, in a statement to National Review, called for Russia’s expulsion. “The Biden administration rushed to get back on the Human Rights Council right after Russia joined it. They should call for Russia to be expelled immediately,” she said.

That call dovetails with what U.N. Watch director Hillel Neuer said in a tweet: “The United Nations General Assembly has the power to suspend the Russian regime from the Human Rights Council on account of its gross and systematic violations.” He also added that the council can request that suspension, though neither body is making moves to do so.

It’s pure happenstance that the first session of the human-rights body in 2022 was scheduled to coincide with Moscow’s increasingly disturbing military assault on Ukraine; the body convenes three times every year, according to a predetermined schedule.

Meanwhile, over the past several days in New York, Ukrainian ambassador Sergiy Kyslytsya has said he wants to strip Russia of its seat on the U.N. Security Council, where it has veto power. He advanced this argument during an emergency session of the organization’s General Assembly Monday, arguing that, although the Soviet Union had been written into the U.N. as a permanent, veto-wielding Security Council member, no one approved the Russian Federation that succeeded the Soviets as their successor.

Whatever its merits in light of Russia’s persistent obstruction on the Security Council, this argument is likely to face significant political headwinds. There’s an appetite for punishing Russia right now, but less interest in reconfiguring the Security Council. But as the Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer pointed out on Twitter, expelling Russia from the U.N. as a whole would require the Security Council’s approval, while removing it from the Human Rights Council would only need a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly, where there’s no such veto power. That could be the place to start.

There are additional reasons why pursuing Russia’s expulsion from the Human Rights Council would be an attractive option for the Biden administration in particular. Moving to boot Moscow from the Human Rights Council is the sort of low-hanging fruit with which it could simultaneously start to make good on its pledges of turning Russia into an international pariah and follow through on some of Blinken’s 2021 promises to use America’s restored access to fix the organization.

In fact, there’s reason to believe that the Biden administration sees this as an attractive possibility. Blinken, addressing the body this morning, questioned whether Russia “should be allowed to remain on this council,” suggesting that a push to expel it could be in the offing.

The council has allowed dictatorships to set the agenda for years, silencing human-rights defenders. The emergency General Assembly session, whose outcomes aren’t beholden to a Russian veto, could be a turning point, setting an important precedent. Any U.S. and allied advocacy for a resolution condemning Russia during that debate could be paired with a more effective proposal to isolate Moscow across the U.N. system — starting with the Human Rights Council.

The Biden administration didn’t need to return to the Human Rights Council. But since it has, it can mitigate the harm that caused by helping to fix the body and advocating the removal of a brutal dictatorship.