audi Arabia has completed its first three months as Chair of the United Nations Human Rights Council. If anything exemplifies the irrelevance of the United Nations and the body’s seeming inability to put its collective foot down on human rights abuses around the world, it is having Saudi Arabia as the leader of the UN body that is supposed to protect those human rights around the world.
You remember Saudi Arabia. It’s the country in the Middle East with which the United States has had a “special relationship” since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. It’s the country from which the U.S. buys 17 percent of its oil. It’s the country that intervened in May in Yemen’s civil war and has killed about 650 civilians per month ever since, all in the name of “combating Iran.” It’s the country that 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were from. It’s also a country that has an absolutely dismal record of human rights abuses.