UN gives Saudi Arabia the women’s rights desk.

Joke? No. I wish it were, but it’s not.

Despite its abysmal record on women’s rights, Saudi Arabia is now chairing the UN’s top women’s rights body, presiding until March 21st at a gathering of global leaders that is supposed to address gender equality amid a reported backlash against women’s rights, at the 69th annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Saudi Arabia is systematically, explicitly, with malice aforethought opposed to women’s rights. Saudi Arabia despises women. The UN insults women.

The UN’s commission on the status of women meets every year and has a unique opportunity to hold country violators of women’s rights to account. Yet instead, it systematically ignores them.

For example:

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Saudi Arabia, which, notwithstanding recent limited reforms, subjugates women through its male guardianship system and jails and tortures women’s rights activists.

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Yemen, which ranks at the bottom of the gender equality index (153/153) and where child marriage is pervasive with more than two thirds of girls being married off before age 18.

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been dubbed the “rape capital of the world.”

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Pakistan, where violence against women is on the rise and conviction rates are low—between 2011 and 2017 over 51,000 cases of domestic violence were reported.

• The CSW has never adopted a single resolution on Iran, where women suffer discrimination under the law in key areas such as marriage, family law, age of criminal responsibility, inheritance, and court testimony. The CSW gives a free pass to Iran for its misogynistic modesty laws, under which women are routinely arrested and sentenced to harsh punishments. If a Muslim woman is found in a relationship with a non-Muslim man, she may be sentenced to be whipped. Women have been sent to jail for speaking out in favor of equal rights for women.

I wonder how many trans women there are in Saudi Arabia.