Rafael Pinto Borges
The United Nations weighed in once more—and, once more, the world rolled its eyes. Immediately after a police raid in Rio de Janeiro that claimed the lives of over one hundred, the UN’s Human Rights Office vehemently denounced Rio de Janeiro’s conservative governor, Cláudio Castro, for what it called a “deadly operation” of “extreme, lethal consequences”. What it left out is that all of the victims were policemen or narcoterrorists. There were no civilian casualties. Not one.
It didn’t make any difference. This is an institution that has long lost its taste for facts. What drives it now is theatre—ritual condemnation on the altar of human rights, the last moral capital of a useless and toothless bureaucratic colossus with very little discernible use. The UN has its preferential villains: strong states asserting their sovereignty, governments that boldly police their own streets, and leaders that still believe law and order are the lifeblood of civilisation. The Brazilian federal government of left-wing President Lula da Silva, of course, had nothing to do with it; the raid was wholly the brainchild of Rio de Janeiro’s conservative leadership. And that is why, like Hungary when it strives to defend its borders or Poland under the previous PiS government when it tried to shield its sovereignty from wanton, undue EU interference, so too was Rio de Janeiro immediately badmouthed by these faux harbingers of virtue. One hopes that Castro will ignore the UN’s calls to surrender his city to criminal gangs and, instead, continue to hit them hard.
This latest, shameful episode comes to confirm, once again, the moral bankruptcy of the United Nations. The UN has—deservedly—become what it was meant not to become: a pulpit. It is now an international moral church of sorts whose priests sit in Geneva and New York and whose scripture is dictated by the bien-pensant Left. It makes a charade of the very notion of impartiality.
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