The travesties plaguing the United Nations continued when Syria was elected deputy chairman of the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (iaea) on Monday.

The General Conference is one of the three main bodies of the iaea, and meets once a year to approve budgets, discuss nuclear-related issues and set future agendas in key areas. The week-long 51st session of the conference began in Vienna on Monday.

Syria is serving in this new capacity even as it comes under the spotlight for alleged nuclear cooperation with North Korea. Syria has also been implicated in the removal of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear material from Iraq.

The appointment—following on the heels of Syria also being reelected as the recording secretary of the UN Disarmament Commission this April, and Iran as vice chairman—illustrates clearly why the UN is failing to prevent nuclear proliferation. With the proliferators on the inside, the body lacks incentive, to say the least.

Not only do such appointments serve to take the focus off the countries that pose the greatest danger, but they also further facilitate another hallmark of UN bodies: Israel-bashing. Syria successfully placed Israel on the agenda for discussion this week as a supposed nuclear threat. The Syrian news agency sana boasted Tuesday, “The efforts exerted by Syria have been successful during the first day of the conference which led to the inclusion of the Israeli nuclear arsenal as an item on the agenda of the conference.”

Gerald Steinberg, chairman of the political science department at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, said the election “reflects the absurdity of the political process inside the iaea.” This move, said Steinberg, “shows how little these types of international frameworks can really do when some of the main players are also the main violators of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.”

More than simply being a farcical body where cruel dictatorships are treated on equal terms with free democracies, the UN is in fact being used as a vehicle for regimes hostile to the West to advance their agenda: crippling the free democracies in this world. While some appointments, such as this most recent one of Syria, are primarily symbolic, they symbolize reality: Members of the UN are using the organization to achieve the very opposite of the goals it is supposed to pursue.