The United Nations Human Rights Council was born of frustration with the poor human rights record of many members of its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. Yet by gaming the system, the world’s nations are undermining the key reform that was supposed to lift the council from the morass of the commission. That leaves the council unable to address several of the world’s most dire situations – most notably, the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. It is time for governments to recommit themselves to the procedure that was supposed to produce a council membership that actually wants to promote human rights.
The 47-member council in Geneva was created in 2006 because the old commission included a collection of repressive governments that joined it not to advance human rights but to undermine them. They routinely voted to protect themselves and their ilk, limiting the commission’s effectiveness.
As proposed by Kofi Annan and expertly navigated by Swedish diplomat Jan Eliasson, that year’s UN General Assembly president, a novel procedure was introduced to select members of the new council – competitive elections. Rather than the backroom deals that had populated much of the old commission with the dictators and tyrants of the world, the UN’s five regional groups would each propose slates of candidates on which the full UN membership, all 193 members of the General Assembly, would vote. The idea was that highly abusive governments could be rejected.
For the first few years, it worked. Each year, Human Rights Watch and its allies would single out the least appropriate candidate for the council, and each year it would either withdraw its candidacy (Syria, Iraq) or lose a contested vote (Belarus, Azerbaijan, Sri Lanka). Even Russia was defeated, in 2016, as its aircraft were bombing Syrian civilians in eastern Aleppo. It lost again in 2023 as it was pummeling Ukrainian civilians.
It worked in 2024 as well, when the General Assembly for the second time rejected Saudi Arabia’s candidacy, given its murder of hundreds of Ethiopian migrants trying to enter from Yemen, its not-so-long-ago bombing of Yemeni civilians, its repression of dissidents including women’s rights activists, and its brazen murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
The problem of regional groups gaming a reformed human right system
But to avoid such embarrassment, the regional groups began to game the system. Many started to propose the same number of candidates as openings, effectively depriving the General Assembly of a choice. That’s how the likes of Burundi, Eritrea, and Sudan hold council seats. Sometimes there were still competitive slates – Saudi Arabia lost last year because there were six governments seeking five seats for the Asia-Pacific region – but uncompetitive slates have become the norm.
Even when slates are competitive, they are often minimally so. In 2020, when Saudi Arabia lost, it was one of five countries in the Asia-Pacific regions vying for four seats. China came in fourth, meaning if there had been a sixth candidate, it might have lost as well.
Western group’s ‘diplomatic laziness’ undermines competition for seats in the council
Even the Western group, despite its ostensible support for an effective council, usually offers uncompetitive slates. The explanation typically offered is that Western governments don’t want to bother with the need to lobby for support, and horse-trade with the General Assembly’s 193 members. But that leaves Western governments in no position to press other regions to present competitive slates. The council suffers for their diplomatic laziness.
The West’s disinclination to use competitive slates took an extraordinary turn last year when the Biden administration opted not to seek a second consecutive term for the United States – a very unusual step – rather than risk losing a competitive election because of its unconditional support for Israel as it bombed and starved Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Iceland, Spain, and Switzerland had all already announced their intention to run. Although Washington could have asked one of them to step aside as it did with Italy three years earlier, that was a difficult argument to sustain given the possibility that Donald Trump would win the November 2024 election (as later occurred) and withdraw the United States from the council, as he did in 2018, because of its criticism of Israel.
Council remains an important venue to investigate and report on human rights violations
The council’s compromised membership limits what it can do. It remains an important venue to investigate, report on, and condemn serious human rights violations, as it is doing in such situations as Afghanistan, Belarus, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Eritrea, Iran, Mali, Myanmar, Nicaragua, North Korea, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Russia, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
But certain countries that clearly should be addressed have escaped scrutiny. In 2021, the Saudi government used a combination of threats and bribes to end the “Group of Eminent Experts” that the council had established to address the Saudi-led coalition’s bombing of civilians in Yemen. Civilian casualties promptly doubled, until a ceasefire a few months later. In 2023, Ethiopia managed to end oversight of its atrocities in Tigray.
Certain governments have managed to avoid scrutiny altogether. Egypt has never been addressed despite the government of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi presiding over the most severe repression in modern Egyptian history. Saudi Arabia’s domestic repression has never been addressed despite the total suppression of dissent and ongoing restrictions on women.
Most importantly, China has never been the subject of a critical resolution. An October 2022 attempt to place China on the council’s agenda for its conduct in Xinjiang, where it had detained one million Uyghur Muslims to force them to abandon their religion, culture, and language, failed by a mere two votes. The basis of the effort was a powerful report by Michelle Bachelet as high commissioner for human rights describing possible crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. She detailed an extraordinarily serious set of abuses by a government that today, because of the combination of its power and its efforts to rewrite human rights standards, poses the gravest threat to the global human rights system.
Certain countries have avoided human rights scrutiny and condemnation
The council has made no further effort to condemn the persecution in Xinjiang, in significant part because Volker Turk, the current high commissioner, has refused during the three years of his tenure to reiterate Bachelet’s findings in his own voice or to mouth one word of condemnation for China’s conduct in Xinjiang. Instead, while standing by the findings of “his office” – never embracing Bachelet’s findings as his own – he claims to be engaging with Beijing, even though he has abandoned the only leverage he has to make the Chinese government pay attention – his ability to investigate, report, and condemn. Beijing is happy to talk and talk endlessly to avoid such pressure.
Meanwhile, Turk provides no leadership to nudge the council toward action. Indeed, he has been so desperate to avoid media questions on Xinjiang that he fled Geneva for a supposedly urgent meeting in Liechtenstein on the day that China was appearing for its universal periodic review before the council.
UN Secretary -General Antonio Guterres was, remarkably, even worse. Through a spokesperson, he distanced himself from Bachelet’s report, stressing her “independence”; said it was “important for everyone to see the Chinese response” to the report, in which Beijing had denied all wrongdoing; urged only that the Chinese government “take on board” the report’s recommendations; and stressed that China “is a very valuable partner” and “we very much hope that that cooperation will continue” —hardly a statement of profound concern about possible crimes against humanity targeting the Uyghurs of Xinjiang.
To be fair, the plight of the Uyghurs is not the only mass atrocity that Guterres and Turk are downplaying. As for Israel’s bombing and starving of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the two have been critical but have refused to call Israel’s mass atrocities a genocide. Guterres has said he wants to defer to the International Court of Justice, where South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is pending, but that is disingenuous. Turk has denounced Israeli war crimes despite pending International Criminal Court charges against senior Israeli officials, and Guterres has condemned war crimes in other contexts despite the possibility of legal action.
As for Xinjiang, with the high commissioner and secretary-general AWOL, the council’s members will have to act on their own. That makes all the more important the nature of that membership. The governments of the world need to revert to the spirit that informed the creation of the Human Rights Council nearly two decades ago.
Yes, contested elections require more work. Yes, it is uncomfortable to face the prospect of losing an election. But unless competition is reintroduced as the norm in the regional slates put forward for General Assembly vote – beginning with the Western group – the council risks degenerating to the dysfunctional level of the discredited commission that it was supposed to replace. Kofi Annan must be turning in his grave.
Kenneth Roth is a visiting professor at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022. This article is drawn from his new book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, which was published by Knopf and Allen Lane.
