Ranking Member Barbara Lee Statement at United Nation Oversight Hearing

Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), Ranking Member of the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee, delivered the following remarks at the Subcommittee's oversight hearing on the United Nations:

Good morning everyone. I am so glad that our subcommittee's first official order of business this year is the critical issue of United States support for the United Nations and I congratulate our new SFOPS Chairman for bringing us together on this topic. Extremely important as our first hearing.

I am even more glad to be hearing today from you, our esteemed United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, to discuss the important diplomatic engagement the Biden-Harris Administration has been undertaking at the United Nations, its specialized agencies, and through UN peacekeeping.

Thank you for joining us today and for bringing your many decades of experience in development and diplomacy to such a critically important post at such a critical time. I can say, personally, having a women of color representing the United States on the largest stage in the world - especially when the great majority of the world is female - is incredibly powerful.

The United Nations is an invaluable and irreplaceable platform for fostering diplomacy and international peace and security. I've been privileged to serve as the U.S. Congressional Representative to the United Nations General Assembly on five different occasions, so I've seen first-hand the importance of the issues debated in New York and how much is at stake without UN engagement.

The United Nations is central to the values and priorities of the United States. The UN's leadership in the Black Sea Grain Initiative to get available food from Ukraine to those facing famine was vital. Just last week, the United Nations negotiated two additional border crossings between Syria and Turkey to get badly needed humanitarian aid through to earthquake victims. These accomplishments are solidly in the United States' interest and make the United Nations indispensable to the American people.

That is why it is so very important to be in the room, to be part of the conversation at the United Nations. We know what happens when we are not. I expect we will hear this morning about bias at the UN against Israel. This bias is allowed to take shape, though, when the United States is missing, like the Commission on Inquiry on Israel. When we are absent, vacuums are created and filled by countries that do not share our values and our priorities. The United States must be present and fully participating in international institutions to protect our own interests as well as advocate for our allies.

Over the past two years, I worked extremely hard with my colleagues to make sure the United States was paying its share for these institutions. I truly wish we would have been able to go further in paying down our unpaid debts for peacekeeping – debts that have accumulated over the last five years and have now reached over a billion dollars. We need to recognize the important role UN peacekeepers play in conflict zones and the benefits that we gain from burden-sharing with other countries through UN peacekeeping missions. We simply cannot continue to tout these multilateral partnerships while, at the same time, maintain arbitrary caps on our contributions and rack up millions of dollars in arrears, leaving other countries to foot the bill. Not paying our dues weakens our ability to lead on a host of international issues and cedes ground to our strategic competitors.

When the world unites, we can achieve amazing things. I am deeply concerned that we have lost ground on the Sustainable Development Goals and achieving any of them by 2030 may now be out of reach. Investments that the United States has led on, such as HIV/AIDS, are an important part of the SDGs and a tangible expression of the goals chosen by people around the world aspiring to a better, safer world.

I was proud of the work we've done, as Chairwoman, to get agreement that the United States needs to step forward, not back, on engagement such as rejoining UNESCO. I will also continue to fight for support to UNFPA that, instead being a political football, should be recognized for the tremendous work they do to support the health of mothers and babies.

Throughout my time in Congress, I have consistently advocated for the strongest possible partnership between the United States and the United Nations. We may not always agree with other nations on every issue, but we must always have a venue where we can hear from other countries and be heard ourselves. America is not always a perfect or consistent voice for human rights, but we can and have been vocal and persuasive. If we leave the table because we do not like who else is sitting there, we will allow those views to go unchallenged and be forced to live with the consequences. We need to keep making the case for human rights and human dignity.

So madame Ambassador, thank you for your leadership, your devotion to diplomacy, and for your testimony today.