Editor's note: Hafijur Rahman is a columnist and Security and Strategic analyst, working in a prominent Strategic Studies Center in Bangladesh. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

For more than 70 years, successive American administrations, including under U.S. President Joe Biden, have cited respect for human rights as its foreign policy cornerstone. But it's been used both as a grandstanding tool to highlight the West and the rest divide in order to undermine its geopolitical adversaries.

And in regards to a human rights-centric policy, the U.S. and its allies have been very selective in how they address human rights, such as when to invoke and whom to target.

Yet, resolution 60/251 of the UN General Assembly has ensured the universality, objectivity, and non-selectivity in the consideration of human rights issues, so as to curb double standards and politicization of the all-important subject matter.

Apparently, Western "selectivity" in applying human rights has long been recognized. Two recently unfolded events have stirred a fierce debate, with many people questioning the integrity of Washington's commitment to human rights.

In the first case, President Biden has withdrawn his nomination of James Cavallaro, a leading law professor at Wesleyan and Yale universities, to an international human rights post, for describing Israel as an "apartheid state." The professor tweeted about his removal on February 15, claiming that the U.S. Department of State had dropped his selection to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights "due to my (earlier) statements denouncing apartheid in Israel/Palestine."

This has come on the heel of a recent Harvard University saga over the institution's denial of a fellowship to Kenneth Roth, the former head of the Human Rights Watch (HRW), over the organization's criticism of Israeli policies. Roth headed HRW for the past three decades, and released its document on Israel's human rights violations against the Palestinians in 2021: "A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution." Most discussions regarding the two incidents have been confined to the topic over perceptions of the prominent influence of Israeli lobbyists across the U.S.'s political and foreign establishment. Israel's violations of international law have allegedly occurred for decades. But Washington has long ignored Israel's actions, since pro-Israel lobby groups have been very successful.

Accordingly, the U.S. and its allies have a long track record of exploiting human rights issues in securing its geopolitical agenda, selectively wielding the toll against its rivals. During the Cold War, the U.S. enforced "human rights diplomacy" as a political tool to attack the other camp. In the new competition with China, the Biden administration has yet again brought the issue to the center of its foreign policy agenda, asserting its ideological grandstanding against the countries it has perceived inimical to the U.S. pursuit of global hegemony.

The so-called human rights promoters in the U.S. have remained blinded to their myriad systematic and flagrant human rights violations at home and in the countries perceived as their allies, while imposing upon other countries of different political systems their own human rights and political values, despite self-imperfections, in efforts to maintain their dominance, through different means.

The politicization of human rights by the self-proclaimed Western human rights champions is a "tangibly real yet counterproductive to the true test of human rights development," said Switzerland-based human rights observer Va Veasna. This can be demonstrated in various ways, such as the selective treatment of human rights issues, the application of double standards in evaluation, the use of confrontation rather than dialogue, and/or the use of unilateral coercion rather than multilateral cooperation.

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