President Joe Biden sees himself as a human rights president, but his legacy is the opposite. Whether through negligence or a desire to prioritize friends over fact, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan increasingly turn a blind eye if not endorse human rights fraud.
Many human rights and conflict resolution organizations start for the right reasons, but their reputations hemorrhage when they prioritize politics over principle. The American Friends Service Committee, for example, won the Nobel Prize in 1947 for work to help refugees irrespective of nationality during World War II. Over subsequent years, though, the group cast neutrality aside.
In the 1970s, it shilled for the Khmer Rouge as the group murdered a million Cambodians. A half-century later, the AFSC makes a mockery of itself by shilling for Hamas, with much the same counterfactual and anti-Western rhetoric. In 2023, Bryan Garman, head of school at the AFSC-affiliated Sidwell Friends, canceled a talk about the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh on short notice because the speaker was conservative. His own political biases trumped on-the-ground discussion of the eradication of a 2,000-year-old indigenous Christian community.
Nor are the Quakers alone. In 2009, the founder of Human Rights Watch took to the New York Times to chastise the group’s anti-Israel obsession. Amnesty International’s report equating Israel with apartheid undermined any claim the group had to put research and process above polemics. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union have likewise degraded their brands by imposing political litmus tests upon the cases they accept. More recently, the International Crisis Group had to hire crisis consultants after its staff exposed themselves as unregistered agents for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Biden’s record in Africa has been especially poor. After Hotel Rwanda’s Paul Rusesabagina was caught red-handed wiring money to terrorists, Blinken pressured the Rwandan government to release him in order to assuage Hollywood friends who clung to a false narrative about a man whose terrorism financing led to a massacre.
At the Africa Democracy Summit, Biden posed watching football with the continent’s worst human rights abusers, effectively letting them off the hook for autocracy, ethnic cleansing, and corruption. Blinken threw Nigeria’s Christians under the bus prior to his visit to the country, green-lighting further Islamist abuses in the country’s oil-rich delta.
Now, Blinken is blessing full-on human rights fraud. According to witnesses and informants, corrupt nongovernmental organizations including the Switzerland-based Civitas International and the California-based Center for Justice and Accountability coached witnesses and falsified testimony.
In one egregious example, an American citizen falsely accused of blood diamond trade committed suicide due to the stigma of accusations subsequently determined to be without basis. With cases overturned, lawsuits loom against the nongovernmental organizations that won millions of dollars in grants based on work deemed fraudulent and unethical by courts in Africa, Europe, and very likely soon the United States.
Enter Ambassador Beth Van Schaack, the Biden administration’s ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice. Van Schaack previously practiced at the Center for Justice and Accountability that is now ground zero for ethics complaints for its work in West Africa and has served on its global adviser board.
Van Schaack has invited Liberian journalist and Global Justice and Research Project Director Hassan Bility, now facing fraud charges, to visit Washington where he photographed himself on the steps of Congress and in the State Department with arms around Van Schaack.
Liberians are outraged. Rather than stand up for human rights and punish fraud that risks peace and security in their country, Biden’s appointee appears to prioritize using her position to help friends avoid justice rather than promote it.
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Make no mistake. With Ukraine, Israel, and Sudan at war, human rights fraud may seem small potatoes, but corruption and conflicts of interest are corrosive. America’s brand is its justice; if conflicts of interest erode that, it opens a door for Russian and Chinese influence.
If Blinken is going to prioritize friendship over ethics and cover-ups over accountability, Congress must step in. Van Schaack is undermining years of honorable work by her predecessors.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.