Campaigners slam Joe Biden as a hypocrite on human rights
Joe Biden took office and human rights activists breathed a sigh of relief that the years of Donald Trump were over.
But according to a damning new assessment, he will leave office accused of promoting human rights only when they coincide with Washington’s strategic interests.
“Rather than treating America’s commitment to its values as a source of strength, the administration behaved as if its own principles were an albatross around its neck,” Sarah Yager, director of Human Rights Watch in Washington, wrote in Foreign Affairs.
“Rather than use American power to advance human rights abroad, Biden has hesitated to confront allies about their abuses.
“The administration downplayed concerns about international legal standards, and toward the end of his term, Biden sent anti-personnel mines to Ukraine — even though the weapons had been under a global ban for decades — and sent weapons to the Israeli government despite the dire consequences of it. violations of the laws of war in Gaza.”
Biden leaves office on Monday at the end of a 50-year political career in which he often emphasized his foreign policy expertise.
Trump will take his place, raising concerns that human rights (if that) will take second place to his America First agenda.
But with the conflict in Gaza and Ukraine still raging, Biden’s scorecard is little better, according to Human Rights Watch.
President Joe Biden delivered a major speech at the State Department on Monday, saying he left the country in a better place than when he took office
Smoke rises from a building destroyed during an Israeli airstrike on the Bureij camp for Palestinian refugees in the central Gaza Strip on January 12, 2025
On Monday, he delivered a farewell foreign policy speech, saying the nation was in a better position now than when he took office.
“The United States is winning the global competition compared to four years ago. America is stronger,” he said.
‘Our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker. We didn’t start a war to make these things happen.”
He delivered his words at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where he laid out his plans four years earlier, at the beginning of his term of office.
At the time, he told his staff that “upholding universal rights” was the “fundamental thread of our global policy, our global power”; Yager said human rights were the United States’ “inexhaustible source of strength.”
He initially fulfilled those promises, she continues, by rejoining the UN Human Rights Council and lifting Trump’s sanctions on the International Criminal Court.
Then something changed. In 2022, Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia, which he had vowed to make a “pariah” state over the murder of a Washington Post columnist, to deliver a punch to its autocratic de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman.
And while the State Department has labeled the war in Sudan a genocide, Biden has befriended leaders in the United Arab Emirates accused of supplying weapons to the most brutal side of the conflict, the Rapid Support Forces.
Biden’s decision to greet Mohamed bin Salman with a fist bump in Saudi Arabia shocked campaigners who pointed to his role in the killing of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi
An American CBU-89/B Gator Mine, a 1,000-pound cluster munition containing anti-tank and anti-personnel mines of the kind found in American stockpiles
“From a strictly pragmatic point of view, it makes little sense for the United States to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on humanitarian aid to stem the effects of a festering conflict when it could prevent further famine and suffering with less costly diplomatic means,” Yager said.
And after campaigning on a promise to continue with a strong commitment to human rights after the Trump years, she continues, he missed this opportunity once in power.
“The damage Trump may be doing to the cause of human rights could create a temptation to look back on the Biden era with nostalgia,” she wrote.
‘But those rose-colored glasses would obscure the real picture.
“As global power shifts, democratic values are the United States’ enduring comparative advantage. Biden claimed to understand this, but he abandoned his own strategy at a critical moment.”