YIR: Biden Nominates Atlantan to U.N. Human Rights Council

The White House announced Oct. 21 that Atlantan Michele Taylor had been nominated to serve as the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“Michele Taylor has served in a number of roles advocating for protection of fundamental human and political rights,” the White House said.

The nomination requires confirmation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the full Senate. As of the second week of December, a committee hearing had not been scheduled.

The Human Rights Council, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, was created in 2006 and is comprised of 47 U.N. member nations. In recent years, the body has been criticized as being anti-Israel.

Taylor, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, serves on the board of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and is an alumni member of the of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, to which she was appointed in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama. On the council, she served on the Committee on State Sponsored Antisemitism and the Committee on Holocaust Denial and State-Sponsored Antisemitism.

In her political life, the 55-year-old native of Palo Alto, Calif., formerly served as vice chair of the national finance committee of the Democratic Party, as co-chair and campaign vice-chair for Michelle Nunn’s 2014 Senate campaign, and as co-chair of former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed’s 2013 re-election campaign.

Taylor was a founding member of Congregation Or Hadash.

President Biden directed that the U.S. rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council, effective with its 2022 term, reversing the June 2018 withdrawal ordered by then-President Donald Trump. U.S. participation on the Council has followed political lines, active under Obama, a Democrat, but not during the administration of his predecessor, former President George W. Bush, a Republican.