For decades, the United Nations claimed its cadre of human rights experts would serve as the conscience of the international community: independent voices defending political prisoners, exposing atrocities, and holding tyrants accountable.
Today, the opposite is true: many of these so-called “independent experts” are funded by dictatorships, defend dictatorships, and attack the democracies they were meant to protect.
The corruption of the system did not happen overnight. As dictatorships gained influence inside the UN Human Rights Council, they learned they need not abolish the language of human rights to weaken it.
They simply had to capture the institutions behind it, including the Council’s powerful network of 86 appointed human rights monitors whose UN reports, while not legally binding, are widely treated as authoritative. It is now time for the democratic world to reclaim this mechanism.
For starters, the appointment process is highly politicized. Take the case of Palestinian Zeina Jallad, who openly justified Hamas’s October 7 attacks and described Israel’s creation as the product of Western wrongdoing.
In March, she was nevertheless appointed as the expert on “unilateral coercive measures,” a mandate established at the initiative of Iran and Cuba. In practice, it is dedicated to condemning Western sanctions against authoritarian regimes.
Jallad’s predecessor, Alena Douhan, conducted official visits to China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Qatar, and Venezuela, issuing reports aligned with those governments while marginalizing their victims. Douhan also received $1.3 million from China, Russia, and Qatar, raising serious concerns about her independence.
These so-called human rights experts routinely weaponize their UN platform to attack democracies while excusing dictatorships. Ben Saul, the UN expert on counter-terrorism and human rights, received $150,000 from China in 2024.
He denounced the Biden administration for killing a senior al-Qaeda leader and, during the most recent Human Rights Council session, he said the US is “raining death,” but Somalia is a model “responsible state” that “is committed to strengthening human rights.”
George Katrougalos, the expert on “democratic and equitable international order,” met in 2025 with Cuba’s dictator President Miguel Díaz-Canel, and then defended Cuba against US measures. After receiving $100,000 from China in 2025, Katrougalos praised President Xi Jinping’s vision as one of “openness, development, and dialogue.” He has also questioned whether democracy is “the only legitimate form of government.”
Even experts appointed to safeguard core Western freedoms have weaponized their positions against that very system. Irene Khan, the UN’s free speech monitor, who has a history of close ties to China, devoted an entire UN report to condemning Western states for allegedly repressing pro-Palestinian protests, while largely ignoring some of the worst free speech crackdowns in countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Turkey, and Myanmar.
Rather than prioritizing visits to regimes that imprison dissidents and silence journalists, Khan traveled to Germany in February over concerns that a liberal democracy was “restricting Palestinian advocacy.”
UN human rights experts' double standards
This pattern of selective outrage is pervasive. In March, 32 UN experts condemned US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs as “illegal.” In January, only 7 UN experts condemned Iran’s slaughter of civilian protestors.
Palestine expert Francesca Albanese said she would not speak on the massacre of Iranian protesters, claiming it falls outside her mandate. Yet she routinely comments on unrelated matters to defend the regime and attack Israel.
She has circulated disinformation, including a fake AI-generated image accusing the US and Israel of intentionally bombing a girls’ school, repeatedly resorted to Holocaust distortion, warned of the “Israelization of Europe,” and amplified a social media post calling Israel “pure evil.” She has been condemned for antisemitism by France, Germany, the US, and Canada, among others. The US rightly sanctioned her.
These are not isolated incidents. They reflect a system increasingly shaped by authoritarian influence over appointments, funding, and institutional priorities – transforming an independent mechanism into a vehicle for ideological advocacy, weaponized against the West.
Reform is urgently needed. Democratic states must insist on transparent, merit-based appointments, eliminate politicized mandates, and impose meaningful oversight. But where mandate holders engage in persistent bias or disinformation, reform alone is not enough. Consequences are required.
The United States took an important step by sanctioning Francesca Albanese. Other governments should follow and extend such measures to additional rapporteurs who abuse their mandates to subvert human rights. Nor should democratic states continue funding a system so clearly compromised.
Human rights cannot be protected by mechanisms captured by those who violate them. Until the UN confronts this reality, its “experts” will continue to legitimize the very regimes they are meant to expose.
The writer is the legal adviser at UN Watch, a Geneva-based human rights organization.