UNESCO launches a budget cut policy

Less than four months after the U.S. cut off funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for granting full membership to the Palestinian Authority, the State Department has quietly put nearly $79 million in its 2013 budget in hopes that Congress will grant a legal waiver allowing UNESCO funding to be restored.

That permission is unlikely to be granted soon, and is already opposed by one of the more influential members of the Republican-dominated House of Representatives. 

“Resuming U.S. funding would give a green light for other U.N. bodies to follow in UNESCO’s footsteps and support the Palestinian statehood push,” Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, declared yesterday, in the wake of the State Department move.

It “sends a disastrous message that the U.S. will fund U.N. bodies no matter what irresponsible decisions they make.”

The UNESCO funding was cut off automatically under U.S. legislation dating back to the ‘90s, which mandated the spending freeze for any grant of full membership to Palestine by a U.N. agency before an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

The logic behind the measure was that anything giving the Palestinian Authority such a boost in status would work against the peace process rather than for it.