Saudi Arabia Forces The United Nations To Remove It From A List Of Child Killers

By Michael Krieger: The United Nations is not just worthless, it is downright dangerous. This is because it maintains an air of humanitarianism while its true purpose is to defend and shield the barbarism and war crimes of its most powerful sponsors.
The true farce of the U.N. was exposed in earnest last year when it named the terrorist state of Saudi Arabia to head up a human rights council. I covered this in several posts, but here’s an excerpt from one of them, Not a Joke – Saudi Arabia Chosen to Head UN Human Rights Panel: 
Saudi Arabia is making a bid to head the United Nations’ Human Rights Council (HRC) just days after it posted a slew of new job openings for executioners who would help carry out beheadings amid a massive uptick in state-sanctioned killings in the country.
U.N. Watch, a nonprofit group that monitors the international body, disclosed Saudi Arabia’s intentions in a recent report and urged the United States to fight against it, describing the move as “the final nail in the coffin for the credibility” of the HRC.
Neuer compared the possible ascension of Saudi Arabia to the top slot to electing “a pyromaniac as the town fire chief.”
A week after being named head of this “human rights council,” we saw the following headline:
38 Dead After Saudi Arabia, Head of UN Human Rights Panel, Bombs Wedding in Yemen
Now we learn the following from The Intercept:

Under intense pressure from the Saudi government, the U.N. secretary general removed the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition in Yemen from a blacklist of child killers only 72 hours after the list was made public.
The coalition had been listed in the appendix of the U.N’s annual report on children and armed conflict, under “parties that kill or maim children” and “parties that engage in attacks on schools and/or hospitals.”
According to the report, at least 785 children were killed and 1,168 injured in Yemen last year alone, 60 percent by coalition airstrikes. The report documents dozens of coalition attacks against Yemeni schools and hospitals.
Saudi Arabia is an unlikely but powerful voice in U.N. human rights deliberations. Last year, despite carrying out a record number of beheadings, the kingdom became the chair of the U.N.’s 47-nation Human Rights Council — a decision that met with international outrage, but that the U.S. said it “welcomed.”
In a press conference outside the United Nations Security Council headquarters on Monday, the Saudi ambassador to the U.N. reacted angrily to the child-killing report and requested that it “be corrected immediately so it does not reflect the accusations that have been made against the coalition.”
Since the war started in March 2015, more than 6,400 people have been killed, the majority by coalition bombs. The Saudi-led coalition has also devastated Yemen by imposing a strict naval blockade on the desert nation, which imports 90 percent of its food and 100 percent of its medicine.
The Saudi ambassador, however, announced that the change to the list was “final and unconditional,” and that he had been “vindicated,” the Associated Press reported.

The removal sparked outrage from advocates and monitoring organizations.  “The U.N. itself has extensively documented the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrikes in Yemen that have caused hundreds of children’s deaths and hit many schools and hospitals,” said Philippe Bolopion, deputy director for global advocacy at Human Rights Watch. “As this list gives way to political manipulation, it loses its credibility and taints the secretary general’s legacy on human rights.”

There you have it.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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