Human rights groups to the United States: Quit trying to blame everybody else for your own petty incompetence.
"The decision to resign from the Council was that of the US administration alone," reads the letter signed by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and 15 other organizations and sent to [United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley] on Friday. "We had legitimate concerns that the US’s proposal to reopen the Council’s institutional framework at the General Assembly would do more harm than good."
The reason Amnesty International and other groups found it necessary to write Haley in the first place is because Haley, who has grown into her role as reliable Trump stooge with aplomb, directly blamed those groups' refusals to support Trump administration policies as a "contributing factor" in the administration withdrawing the United States from the U.N. Human Rights Council. She claimed they "thwarted" U.S.-pushed reforms and accused them of "undermining" the United States efforts.
The Trump administration now joins the world's dictatorships in being very, very put out by ... Amnesty International. You cannot accuse these lumps of being subtle.
In their response to Haley, the 18 human rights groups essentially tell Haley and her poison pen to sod off.
As you know, we are independent organizations that do not work on behalf of any government. We focus on building support for policies we believe will better the lives of those most affected by abuse - which does mean we are sometimes opposed to proposals laid out by certain governments, or the proposed means of pursuing them, especially when we believe such an initiative could be more harmful than not.
It’s unclear whether Haley picked a fight with human rights groups on purpose or whether it was just a passing burp during the administration’s wider fight to rewrite human rights laws to meet Donald Trump’s personal whims. Don’t know, don’t care. When the top human rights protectors in the world are all telling you you can go to hell, thank you very much, it’s a pretty sure bet you’ve botched things and then some.
