North Korea named to U.S.-funded WHO's Executive Board

FPI / June 2, 2023

In April of 2020, President Donald Trump halted U.S. funding to the United Nations World Health Organization. Trump accused the WHO of “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus” and called its opposition to U.S. travel restrictions on China in the outbreak’s early months “disastrous.”

When Team Biden was installed in January 2021, U.S. funding to the WHO was restored.

In 2021, American taxpayers handed the UN agency over $12 billion, accounting for roughly a quarter of its total budget.

Here's what American taxpayers are getting for their money: The WHO has named North Korea to its Executive Board.

According to the WHO, the Executive Board "is composed of 34 technically qualified members elected for three-year terms. The main functions of the Board are to implement the decisions and policies of the Health Assembly, and to advise and generally facilitate its work."

Human Rights Watch reports that North Kora "remains one of the most repressive countries in the world. Ruled by third-generation authoritarian leader Kim Jong-Un, the government responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with deepened isolation and repression, increased ideological control, and by maintaining fearful obedience of the population by using threats of torture, extrajudicial executions, wrongful imprisonment, enforced disappearances, and forced hard labor."

In 2022, the North Korean government "failed to protect economic rights, resulting in violations of the right to health, food, and access to an adequate standard of living," Human Rights Watch added.

That's what you want, a regime that violates the "right to health" of its own citizens sitting on the UN health agency's Executive Board. And U.S. taxpayers are footing a large chunk of the bill.

Given the WHO's history, the North Korea appointment is not surprising. The WHO Executive Board also include communist China, with its own grim history of deadly man-made famines, and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

"Such appointments are not unusual in United Nations agencies, however, with Saudi Arabia elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the Islamic Republic of Iran actually winning the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Council," Jack Montgomery of The National Pulse noted on Thursday.

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