President of Argentina Javier Milei will withdraw the country from the U.N. Human Rights Council as part of a broader policy of reducing Argentine representation in U.N. agencies deemed unnecessary, several Argentine media outlets reported on Monday.
Although President Milei has not publicly made any relevant announcement at press time, unnamed Argentine presidential sources confirmed the withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council to Todo Noticias.
Since the Council’s creation in 2006, Argentina has reportedly occupied a seat for roughly ten of the past 19 years and led the organization in 2022 during the preceding administration of socialist former President Alberto Fernández. According to Argentine outlets, the South American country will not present its candidacy to the Council this year.
Todo Noticias detailed that Argentina’s withdrawal is in line with the decisions adopted by President Donald Trump, who had the United States withdraw from the U.N. Human Rights Council in early February. The Council has been widely described as a venue in which authoritarian dictators sanitize their respective records of human rights violations while often condemning Israel and the United States.
Upon taking office, Milei ordered a dramatic “realignment” of Argentina’s foreign policy with the United States and Israel as its main allies, overturning nearly two decades’ worth of socialist governments that pushed the South American nation towards Iran, China, Russia, and the region’s three authoritarian regimes: Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Milei has been a fierce critic of the United Nations and torched the international organization during his debut speech at the U.N. general assembly last year. While he noted that the U.N. achieved its original purpose of preventing a third world war, he warned that the organization has since then become “a leviathan of multiple tentacles that wants to decide not just what every state or nation should do, but how all the citizens of the world should live.”
Milei further stressed that the United Nations is “a supranational government model of international bureaucrats who want to impose on the citizens of the world a certain way of life” and criticized the Human Rights Council for allowing authoritarian regimes to occupy some of its seats.
“We have seen how an organization that was created to defend human rights has been one of the main drivers of the systematic violation of freedom, such as with the global quarantines during 2020, which should be considered a crime against humanity,” Milei said at the time.
“In this very house that claims to defend human rights, bloody dictatorships such as Cuba and Venezuela have been allowed to join the Human Rights Council without the slightest reproach,” he continued.
Clarín reported that the situation would mark the first time in the Council’s history that Argentina declined its candidacy, leaving it to be replaced by Ecuador in the body’s upcoming October election. Milei is scheduled to deliver his second speech at the United Nations General Assembly later this month.
Clarin further reported that Milei may hold a bilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he is “considering declining his desired trip to Argentina.”
Diplomatic sources in New York told Clarín that the decision has already been communicated to Francisco Troppepi, the Permanent Representative of Argentina to the United Nations, who should then inform its U.N. counterpart in Geneva, where the Human Rights Council is based.
In May, during U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s visit to Argentina, President Milei formalized Argentina’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) — an organization that Milei has widely panned over its “nefarious” handling of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, and which he deemed the “executive branch of what was the largest experiment in social control in history.”
At the time, both President Milei and Sec. Kennedy called for the “creation of an alternative international health system” and vowed to jointly promote government policies to improve the health and access to health care of their citizens.
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