Oversight and Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman Mills Delivers Opening Remarks at Subcommittee Hearing on U.S. Accountability at the United Nations
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, House Foreign Affairs Oversight and Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman Cory Mills delivered opening remarks at a subcommittee hearing titled “U.S. Accountability at the United Nations: Challenges and Opportunities for Reform.”
-Remarks-
Good afternoon and welcome to today's hearings titled the U.S. Accountability at the United Nations: Challenge and Opportunities for Reform.
On behalf of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Intelligence, I welcome our witnesses. We are grateful to have you with us and look forward to your testimony.
And if the American people have learned anything from President Trump, it is that we should not tolerate the status quo if it does not make America safer, stronger, more prosperous and promote our values. That is why we are having this conversation today.
Over 80 years ago, in the aftermath of World War II, the United States championed the establishment of the United Nations for the primary purpose of promoting global peace and security. At a time when the world was still recovering from the most destructive war in history, the U.N.’s founders sought to prevent such a war from ever happening again.
Today, the United Nations bureaucracy has 193 member states with over 100,000 personnel and a total budget of $3.7 billion a year, becoming a bloated and ineffective organization. Peacekeeping missions and humanitarian programs have continued for decades as conflicts have yet to resolve. Authoritarian tyrants have gone on to abuse human rights, with only U.N. reports and strongly worded letters to stop them from their attempts.
When we talk about the idea of preventing funding to certain things like peacekeeping, I want to remind everyone of the examples of what President Trump has done as a peacemaker. Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, Rwanda and the DRC, India and Pakistan, Egypt and Ethiopia, Serbia and Kosovo, The Abraham Accords, Gaza and the Board of Peace. These are just examples of what President Trump has done without the need of additional peacekeeping funding.
We have a serious problem when U.N. member states invoke international law to condemn democratic nations, particularly the United States and Israel, for their self-defense while simultaneously shielding authoritarian human rights abusers like Nicolas Maduro and the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from accountability. When Iran is nominated to the U.N. Economic and Social Council's Committee on Program and Coordination, a committee which is responsible for shaping U.N. priorities on human rights and counterterrorism, we have a serious problem. And earlier this week, Iran, as the Chairman had pointed out, was nominated to serve as Vice President on the U.N. Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference – hypocrisy and absolutely laughable.
We have a serious problem when anti-Semitism in the U.N. is something that has been widely condemned and “never again” reappears in international forums that give disproportionate amount of attention to Israel, while others around the world’s most severe human rights abusers remain ignored, including, as pointed out, the estimated 1 million Uyghur that the Chinese Communist Party forced into concentration camps. We also cannot forget that the U.N. has not only been a forum for hypocrisy and EU efforts to push abortion and radical gender ideology, it also employed Hamas terrorists who killed an estimated 1,200 innocent people on October 7th.
If the International Peace Organization, the United States champion, is not holding human rights abusers accountable, then the U.N. risks doing the opposite, ultimately legitimizing them. The American people are justified to question why their taxpayer dollars should continue to support institutions that employ terrorists, and that fall short of the founding principles.
While the U.N. has great potential, the U.N. needs serious reform. We must ensure that all taxpayer dollars sent to the U.N. are not supporting U.S. adversaries, leftists and woke pet projects, or actual terrorists themselves. We must ensure that the U.S. contributions advance U.S. interests and establish long-term results. And we must consider reforms not only to top-line budget items, but to how the U.N. operates as a whole and an organization to include how it conducts employee vetting as well as its internal investigations and criminal activity.
The United States has an opportunity to leverage U.S. funding to reform the U.N. system and see a newfound excellence in international organizations. We look forward to discussing these opportunities with you, and with that, I will open it up for the opening statements of our witnesses.
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