Wednesday, June 26, 2013

UN Human Rights Funding: Your Tax Dollars at Work?

06/26/2013

In 2012, leading democracies contributed tens of millions of dollars to the UN human rights system, through funding allocated from the general budget and additional voluntary contributions given by each country to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights:

United States: $31,273,996
United Kingdom: $11,708,747
Germany: $13,277,191
France: $7,806,841
Italy: $4,193,394
Netherlands: $13,727,350
Canada: $7,572,973
European Commission: $7,152,139

(Source: OHCHR Report 2012)

While some of these funds are well spent on UN mandates that legitimately speak out for victims of torture or repression, according to an internal UN chart entitled “Financial implications of recent HRC resolutions by type of mandate” — publicized here for the first time — millions of dollars are being wasted by the UN human rights system to fund questionable mandates that either have no connection to individual human rights or, worse, are designed by countries such as Cuba as political mechanisms to attack democracies:

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