By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News-
A leading human rights organizations slammed U.S. President Joe Biden Thursday for not living up to the promises he made when coming into office and failing to adequately defend democracy.
In his introductory essay to the groupโs just-released annual World Report covering 2021, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth gave Biden a mixed grade.
On the one hand, the administration rejoined the UN Human Rights Council and World Health Organization, and is back in the fight against climate change โ all positions that former president Donald Trump had abandoned.
On the other hand, he wrote, โDuring key summits, Biden seemed to lose his voice when it came to public denunciation of serious human rights violations.โ The president had just mentioned that he had brought up human rights in meetings with the leaders of Russia, China and Turkey, but without specifying โwhat consequences might ensue if repression continued.โ This vagueness left their citizens โuncertainโ about what kind of support they had in the White House if they would agitate for change, he charged.
Roth also panned the administrationโs continued opposition with the International Criminal Court (ICC). He specifically criticized its resistance to investigations of โUS torture in Afghanistan or Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,โ crimes which he claimed neither country โhas conscientiously prosecuted.โ
A certain bias could be detected in the lack of the word โallegedโ before mentioning the charges, as well as in Rothโs ignoring the fact that both Israel and the U.S. have robust judiciaries that have taken on cases of possible illegal behavior on the part of their troops. In such countries, the ICC is not empowered to act even if an alleged victim asks it to do so.
In the reportโs section on the United Statesโ foreign policy, HRW noted that the administration had imposed needed sanctions on autocracies such as China, Myanmar, Belarus, Cuba and Nicaragua. But it criticized arms sales and security assistance to โcountries with poor human rights records,โ such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. These three, plus Israel, continue to receive arms โdespite their persistent repression.โ
Israel, it added, had received $735 million in additional arms sales even as the Jewish state โused US-made weapons in May airstrikes in Gaza that violated the laws of war and apparently amount to war crimes.โ
There was no context given such as mentioning that the Hamas terrorist organization that rules the Gaza Strip had initiated that monthโs conflict by launching thousands of missiles indiscriminately into Israel. Neither was any evidence offered to substantiate the charges of โviolationsโ of the laws of war, which Israel has refuted by showing what care it took during the 11-day operation to avoid civilian casualties, among other human rights practices commonly used by the IDF in its fight against its terrorist adversaries.
Image:ย Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>;, via Wikimedia Commons
