Later today, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will take a bill authored by Committee Chairman Ros-Lehtinen to reform the United Nations. At the heart of the bill is a requirement for the United Nations to switch its funding mechanism from a mandatory to a voluntary basis. This critical change will give the U.S. and other member-states real leverage to press for reform at the UN; if they don’t shape up, the gravy train stops. It also gives the U.S. the ability to prevent U.S. taxpayer dollars from paying for backwards initiatives at the UN which undermine U.S. interests abroad.
A few examples of outrageously flawed UN entities being funded by U.S. taxpayers are below. These may appear to be taken straight from The Onion, but, sadly, you can’t make this stuff up.
· 8/23/2011 – Cuba, which has provided biotechnology to other rogue regimes and which is closely allied with serial proliferators Iran, North Korea, and Syria, assumes the presidency of the Conference on Disarmament.
· 06/29/2011 – North Korea, a serial nuclear proliferator that secretly developed nuclear weapons and continues to violate multiple UN Security Council sanctions resolutions, assumes the presidency of the Conference on Disarmament.
· 11/10/2010 – Saudi Arabia, which severely restricts the human rights of Saudi women, is elected to the board of UN Women.
· 6/21/2010 – Cuba, a gross human rights abuser, is named vice chair of the UN Human Rights Council.
· 05/13/2010 – Libya, a gross human rights abuser, is elected to the UN Human Rights Council.
· 4/28/2010 – Iran, which severely restricts the human rights of Iranian women and has stoned women death, is announced as member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.
· 5/12/2009 – China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, all serial human rights abusers, were re-elected to the UN Human Rights Council.
U.S. tax dollars have also been used to fund the UN’s “Durban” conferences on racism, all three of which were taken over by rogues such as Iran and Libya and turned into anti-American, anti-Semitic hate fests.
Without reform, the UN will continued to be used as a tool of tyrannical regimes to push their agendas. And without ending the current no-strings-attached approach to UN funding, calls for reform will continue to be ignored.
H.R. 2829, the United Nations Transparency, Accountability, and Reform Act is about making the UN work again. It stops asking for reform, and starts demanding reform. And it prevents U.S. taxpayer dollars from funding initiatives that undermine U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives.
For more information on this bill, which is supported by more than 125 co-sponsors, please click here.
Visit the Committee's website to watch the markup live at 2:00 p.m. TODAY.