Dear Anna and all GNHRE colleagues, 

Thanks for raising this issue. A few quick thoughts if I may - I am not sure that any kind of statement from GNHRE about the United States withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council would have much utility. Even aside from utility, I doubt that in principle it is commendable, for the following reasons:

1. Membership at the Council is neither a right (in the sense that the US or any other State has an automatic right to be elected to it), nor an obligation of the US, nor of any other UN member State for that matter. It should be considered an honour and a privilege that depends upon any State receiving a sufficient number of votes to serve in that forum. Membership is therefore a political matter concerning a political body.
2. If the current US Administration considers membership at the Council neither an honour nor a privilege, then that attitude constitutes its own disservice - again a political matter.
3. In my humble opinion, it is not that the US should be on or off the Council (recall that the George W Bush Administration for the very first time in history garnered insufficient votes to remain on the predecessor body of the Council, then called the ‘UN Commission on Human Rights’ following its withdrawal from the Kyoto Pact on global warming in the first months of 2001), but that the current US Administration is willing to jeopardize, for good or for ill, its international clout at the Human Rights Council over its support over Israel.
4. The concern should be current official and unofficial US policy on climate change, migration, racism, free trade, judicial independence, free speech, possible electoral interference, human rights, lack of international law and multilateral institutions including the UN, EU, OSCE, NATO etc etc etc.
5. Council membership appears to me to be a rather insignificant element of this broader, much more relevant picture. Not only that, but I would rather doubt that the UN Human Rights Council would be better off if the current US Ambassador to the UN stayed engaged at the Council, because thus far at least with this particular Administration, US policy has been quite bellicose and unyielding on all the major international human rights issues, as well as in other fields of multilateral cooperation.

In short, I personally do not see much utility in worrying about US non-membership at the UN Human Rights Council, and for GNHRE issuing some kind of statement, unless the more serious underlying reasons behind this symptomatic rejection of multilateralism were addressed.

Best wishes to all GNHRE colleagues,

Lyal S. Sunga