Version 1.1 · First published 14 June 2026 · Last updated 14 June 2026 · Published by Libera Mondo z.s., Prague

Facts current as of June 2026. This is a living document; substantive revisions are logged in the version history and the version number is incremented.

The United Nations built its human rights machinery to defend the persecuted. Four structural failures now turn it toward the governments doing the persecuting. The test of reform is whether the system can measure everyone with one ruler.

In brief

This article documents how the United Nations' principal human rights body, the Human Rights Council in Geneva, has come to reproduce the very failures that doomed the commission it replaced in 2006. On four points of public record, the Council seats the governments it exists to judge — its 2025 elections were uncontested in every regional group, returning states that its own critics had called unfit; it scrutinizes selectively, devoting a permanent agenda item to one country, Israel, and none to any other, with roughly 112 resolutions on Israel since 2006; it shields the most powerful abusers, having never once passed a country-specific resolution on China and voting down even a debate on Xinjiang in 2022; and it administers two classes of refugee by two standards. The article argues that the objection is not to the United Nations but to selectivity itself, in every direction it runs, and that the remedy is the standard the UN set for itself: one ruler, applied to all.

On 14 October 2025, the United Nations General Assembly elected fourteen states to its Human Rights Council. There was no contest. In each of the five regional groups, the governments had nominated exactly as many candidates as there were seats, so the result was settled before a ballot was cast. Among the winners were Egypt and Vietnam, both of which Human Rights Watch had, days earlier, called "woefully unfit" for membership.1 Both took their seats for the 2026–2028 term.

This is not a malfunction. It is the system working as it now works — and to see why, it helps to recall what the Council was built to replace.

The United Nations created its first human rights body, the Commission on Human Rights, in 1946, and for a time it did serious work: it drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But as the decades passed, the governments with the most to hide learned that the surest way to escape scrutiny was to join the body that conducted it. By the early 2000s the Commission seated China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe; in 2003, its chairmanship passed to Libya under Muammar Gaddafi.2 In 2005, Secretary-General Kofi Annan concluded that the body could not be repaired: its "declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations," he told its members, and he named the cause precisely — sessions grown politicized, scrutiny applied selectively.3 The Commission was abolished, and in 2006 the Human Rights Council took its place — a fresh start, built to be principled where its predecessor had been captured.

What follows is a record of how completely the fresh start failed. The two faults Annan named, politicization and selectivity, are the two this article finds in the body created to cure them. The objection is not to the United Nations, and not to international cooperation. It is to selectivity itself — a system that speaks the language of universal rights while applying it unevenly. That failure runs in both directions at once: it over-scrutinizes some states and exempts others, and the two are the same fault seen from opposite sides. The record is clearest on four points.

The accused on the bench

The Council has forty-seven seats, filled by the General Assembly for three-year terms, with no member eligible for immediate re-election after two consecutive terms.4 On paper the design is sound: members are required, under the founding resolution, to uphold "the highest standards" in human rights and to cooperate fully with the Council. In practice, the regional blocs decide the outcome before the Assembly votes. When a bloc nominates as many candidates as it has seats — a "clean slate" — the election is a formality, and every candidate wins. The 2025 election was uncontested in all five regional groups.5

It was not always this way. When the Council held its first elections in 2006, candidates in most regions had to compete: more states ran than there were seats, and two governments with poor records, Iran and Venezuela, failed to win.6 Two decades later the competition has drained out of the process. The blocs have learned to negotiate the result in advance, and the vote has become the ratification of a deal already struck. The roster, past and present, now reads in part like a list of the governments the Council's mandate was written to examine: China, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela.

Membership is not ceremonial. Members shape the Universal Periodic Review that every state undergoes, vote on whether independent investigators are appointed to a crisis, and chair the Council's forums and panels.7 Those roles are not hypothetical prizes. In 2015, the Council placed Saudi Arabia's ambassador at the head of its Consultative Group — the five-member panel, one seat per region, that interviews and shortlists the independent experts who go on to investigate abuses around the world.8 In 2023, the Council's president appointed Iran to chair its Social Forum, handing a human-rights platform to the representative of a government then in the middle of the bloodiest crackdown in its recent history. The protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022 had by then left hundreds dead, and the state had begun executing those it detained: Mohsen Shekari, twenty-three, was hanged that December after a Revolutionary Court convicted him of "waging war against God," the first protester put to death for taking part.9 The United States refused to attend the forum.10

There is a defense of all this, and it deserves a fair hearing. The Council was built on universality: it is meant to seat all regions and every kind of government, on the theory that engagement reforms behavior better than exclusion does, and that each member — abuser included — is itself subject to the Periodic Review. The founding resolution even provides a mechanism to suspend a member that commits gross violations.4

The trouble is that the tools rarely bite. The suspension power has been used once in twenty years, against Libya in 2011, after Gaddafi turned his guns on protesters.11 The Periodic Review is peer assessment without enforcement: states recommend, and the state under review accepts the recommendations or declines them. Universality is a real principle, and a sound one. But a body that admits the accused to the bench, lets them help decide who is investigated, and puts them in charge of selecting the investigators cannot return a credible verdict on anyone.

One ruler, applied unevenly

Every regular session of the Council includes a standing agenda item, numbered seven, dedicated to a single country: Israel. No other state, whatever its record, has a permanent item of its own; every other situation is taken up under general headings. This is not an accident of practice. It is written into the Council's architecture. The institution-building package the Council adopted in June 2007 — resolution 5/1 — sets out the body's permanent agenda, and there, as Item 7, sits "the human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories."12

The same resolution opens by listing the principles the Council is meant to operate by. Among them: universality, impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectiveness.12 The document that enshrined a permanent item for one country names non-selectiveness as a founding value, on an earlier page. The contradiction was noticed at once. Within days, the United Nations' own Secretary-General said as much: in a statement issued on 20 June 2007, Ban Ki-moon's office described him as "disappointed at the Council's decision to single out only one specific regional item," given the range of alleged abuses elsewhere in the world.13

The numbers follow the structure. There is no official UN tally of country-specific resolutions, but the most complete public count, kept by the monitoring group UN Watch from the UN's own records, finds that the Council has adopted around 112 resolutions targeting Israel since 2006 — more than a third of all its country-specific resolutions, and by some counts close to half — against 45 for Syria, 16 for Iran, and 11 for Russia.14 One may hold any view of any single conflict and still see the problem: a standing item for one state and none for any other is selectivity built into the furniture.

Here too there is a serious counter-argument. Defenders of Item 7 — among them Palestinian legal organizations — argue that the occupation is a uniquely prolonged situation with a specific status in international law, on the UN's agenda since 1947, and that a permanent item reflects an ongoing reality rather than a bias.15 The gravity of the occupation is not in question. But gravity is not the test. The test is whether the same instrument is available for every grave situation, and it is not: there is one permanent country item, and the country is always the same. That is precisely what the Council's own founding principle of non-selectiveness was meant to rule out.

The powerful are exempt

The selectivity that over-scrutinizes one state under-scrutinizes the strong. China — a permanent member of the Security Council — has never been the subject of a country-specific resolution at the Council in its entire history.16 The scale of what goes unexamined is not in doubt. By UN estimates, around a million Uyghurs and other Muslims have passed through a network of detention camps in Xinjiang.17 The repression has a face, too. Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur economist who spent two decades working to build understanding between Uyghurs and Han Chinese, was sentenced to life in prison for "separatism" in 2014; he has been held since, much of the time in solitary confinement, and his family has not been allowed to see him since 2017. In 2019 the European Parliament awarded him its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.18

In August 2022 the UN's own human rights office concluded that abuses in Xinjiang "may constitute" crimes against humanity. That October, the Council voted on a motion that asked for nothing more than a debate on the report. It was defeated, nineteen votes to seventeen, with eleven abstentions — only the second time in the body's history that a motion had failed.19 Amnesty International said the vote "protects the perpetrators of human rights violations rather than the victims."20 China's ambassador framed the stakes for every government watching: "Today China is targeted; tomorrow any other developing country could be targeted."21 Tibet, under occupation for more than seventy years, has likewise never drawn country-specific scrutiny from the Council.

Russia is shielded by a quieter route. The country recognizes forty-seven Indigenous "small-numbered" peoples, forty of them in the North, Siberia, and the Far East, some numbering only a few hundred and several near extinction.22 Their advocates face an escalating apparatus of repression: organizations branded "foreign agents," an informal Indigenous network declared "extremist," activists prosecuted under counter-terrorism law, and defenders blocked from leaving the country to attend UN meetings. The war in Ukraine has sharpened the pattern — Indigenous and ethnic-minority communities have borne losses on the front lines out of all proportion to their size. None of this is documented only by Russia's critics. The UN's own Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation, Mariana Katzarova, describes a repression that is coordinated and "central to State policy."23

It has a name. In December 2025, Daria Egereva — a representative of the Selkup, one of Russia's smallest Indigenous peoples, numbering some 3,500, and a co-chair of an international Indigenous climate forum — was arrested in Moscow and charged with participating in a terrorist organization, a charge tied to her work with an Indigenous advocacy network that Amnesty International and other rights groups call retaliation for her advocacy. On the same day, security services searched the homes of at least seventeen other Indigenous activists across seven regions. She remains in pre-trial detention; in June 2026, ten UN human rights experts jointly pressed Russia over her case. If convicted, she faces up to twenty years.24 More than seventy Indigenous organizations wrote to Russia's president with a single line: "Speaking out is not a crime."25

The institution has an answer here as well. China, its defenders note, is not unscrutinized: it underwent its Periodic Review in 2024, and country-specific resolutions are a blunt, easily politicized tool that great powers can resist in any forum.26 But the 2022 vote is the rebuttal to its own defense. The motion asked only to talk about a UN report — the least intrusive step the Council could take — and it was still blocked. Scrutiny that stops at a review no one is obliged to act on is the form of accountability without the substance. Power buys silence; weakness buys neglect.

Two standards for refugees

The United Nations runs two refugee systems. The High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR, is responsible for displaced people everywhere, and is mandated to pursue durable solutions to their plight: resettlement, integration in a host country, or voluntary return. One population is carved out of that system and assigned to a separate agency. UNRWA serves Palestinians alone, has no resettlement mandate, and registers the descendants of the original 1948 refugees down the generations.27 When it began operating in 1950 it served around 750,000 people. Today some 5.9 million are eligible — a population that has grown not through new displacement but through descent, generation after generation registered into a status none of them can resolve.28

This is the most contested of the four points, and honesty requires stating the other side at its strongest. UNRWA and the UN reply that counting the children of refugees as refugees is standard practice, applied to protracted populations from Afghanistan and Somalia as well; that the two agencies simply have different historical mandates; and that a population remains in limbo because the conflict that displaced it remains unresolved, not because anyone engineered permanence.29 The dispute over inherited status is real, and it is not ours to settle here.

What is not in dispute is the structure. One displaced population is administered by an agency mandated to end its displacement. Another is administered by an agency with no such mandate, toward no resolution, by the same organization. Whatever one concludes about why, the two-track design is a fact, and it produces two standards.

Where this leaves us

Libera Mondo is non-partisan and apolitical. We take no side in any of the conflicts named above, and this is not a brief for any government against another. Our objection is to selectivity itself, in every direction it runs. The over-scrutiny of one state and the exemption of others are not opposite problems to be weighed against each other; they are the same failure, and both betray the people the system was built to protect — the Uyghur economist serving life for building bridges, the protester hanged in a Tehran prison, the Selkup activist in a Moscow cell, and the millions whose suffering draws no resolution because no powerful government is discomfited by naming it.

The United Nations wrote its own standard into resolution 5/1: universality, impartiality, non-selectiveness. We hold it to that standard. We do not ask the Council to be abolished; the world needs a credible one. We ask only that it measure everyone with one ruler. The case for that does not rest on argument. It rests on the record, and the record is plain.

A voice for the forgotten.

Sources

  1. Human Rights Watch, "UN: Abusive Governments Set to Win Rights Council Seats," 9 October 2025 — https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/10/09/un-abusive-governments-set-to-win-rights-council-seats ; UN General Assembly, election of Human Rights Council members, 14 October 2025 — https://www.un.org/en/ga/80/meetings/elections/hrc.shtml Back to note
  2. On the Commission on Human Rights' decline and membership (China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Zimbabwe; Libya elected chair in 2003): Sur — International Journal on Human Rights, "From Commission to Council" — https://sur.conectas.org/en/from-commission-to-council/ ; UN News — https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/03/367882 Back to note
  3. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, address to the Commission on Human Rights and the 2005 report In Larger Freedom — the Commission's "declining credibility has cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations," its sessions politicized and its work selective: CBS News — https://www.cbsnews.com/news/un-chief-wants-more-rights-muscle/ Back to note
  4. UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251 (15 March 2006), establishing the Human Rights Council — 47 members, three-year terms, "highest standards" obligation, suspension mechanism — https://undocs.org/A/RES/60/251 Back to note
  5. FIDH, "UN Human Rights Council Elections 2025" — https://www.fidh.org/en/international-advocacy/united-nations/human-rights-council/united-nations-human-rights-council-elections-2025-continued-scrutiny ; ISHR scorecards; UN Watch election preview, October 2025. Back to note
  6. Carnegie Council, "The Human Rights Council: A New Era in UN Human Rights Work?" (2007) — in the first elections (May 2006) most regions fielded more candidates than seats; Iran and Venezuela failed to win — https://carnegiecouncil.org/media/journal/001-8 Back to note
  7. OHCHR, About the Human Rights Council (Universal Periodic Review, special procedures, forums) — https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/about-council Back to note
  8. Selection of Saudi Arabia's ambassador, Faisal bin Hassan Trad, to chair the Council's Consultative Group (a five-member, one-per-region panel that shortlists special-procedures experts for 75-plus mandate positions), 2015: The Times of Israel — https://www.timesofisrael.com/saudis-un-envoy-to-remain-head-of-influential-human-rights-panel/ Back to note
  9. Execution of Mohsen Shekari, 8 December 2022 — first protester executed in connection with the Mahsa Amini protests, convicted of moharebeh ("waging war against God") by a Revolutionary Court; UN experts condemned it: UN News — https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/12/1131537 . Some 500 protesters were killed and thousands detained in the crackdown. Back to note
  10. Appointment of Ambassador Ali Bahreini to chair the 2023 Social Forum (announced 10 May 2023) and US Mission Geneva's refusal to participate (2 November 2023): European Parliament parliamentary question E-001936/2023 — https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-001936_EN.html Back to note
  11. UN News: "General Assembly suspends Libya from rights body," 1 March 2011 — the only use of the suspension power to date — https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/03/367882 Back to note
  12. Human Rights Council Resolution 5/1, "Institution-building of the United Nations Human Rights Council," 18 June 2007 — permanent agenda (Item 7) and statement of principles (universality, impartiality, objectivity, non-selectiveness) — https://ap.ohchr.org/documents/e/hrc/resolutions/a_hrc_res_5_1.doc Back to note
  13. Statement attributable to the Spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, 20 June 2007, expressing his disappointment "at the Council's decision to single out only one specific regional item"; reported the same day by Haaretz — https://www.haaretz.com/1.4945266 . The Council had adopted Resolution 5/1 two days earlier, on 18 June 2007. Back to note
  14. UN Watch database (compiled from UN records, updated January 2026): approx. 112 Human Rights Council resolutions on Israel since 2006, vs. 45 Syria, 16 Iran, 11 Russia, 4 Venezuela — https://unwatch.org/2025-unga-resolutions-on-israel-vs-rest-of-the-world/ . The structural fact (one standing country item) is from Resolution 5/1; the numeric tally is UN Watch's count, attributed as such. Back to note
  15. Al-Haq, position paper on retaining Human Rights Council Agenda Item 7 — https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6184.html Back to note
  16. On the absence of any China country-specific resolution at the Council since 2006: The Diplomat — https://thediplomat.com/2022/10/un-human-rights-council-rejects-western-bid-to-debate-chinas-xinjiang-abuses/ (with Reuters reporting). Distinct from the pre-2006 Commission, where a 1991 Sub-Commission resolution on Tibet was adopted. Back to note
  17. UN estimates of detention in Xinjiang (around one million or more), cited in the OHCHR assessment (31 August 2022) and UN expert statements — https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region-peoples Back to note
  18. Human Rights Watch, "China: Free Uyghur Economist Ilham Tohti From Life Sentence," 2024 — https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/23/china-free-uyghur-economist-ilham-tohti-life-sentence . Sentenced to life for "separatism," 23 September 2014; held largely in solitary confinement; family visits barred since early 2017; European Parliament Sakharov Prize, 2019. Back to note
  19. OHCHR Xinjiang assessment, 31 August 2022 (abuses "may constitute … crimes against humanity"); OHCHR meeting summary, 6 October 2022 (draft decision rejected, 17 in favor, 19 against, 11 abstentions) — https://www.ohchr.org/en/meeting-summaries/2022/10/human-rights-council-adopts-21-texts-and-rejects-one-draft-decision ; "second defeat in the body's history" per Reuters. Back to note
  20. Amnesty International, statement on the Xinjiang vote (Agnès Callamard), 6 October 2022 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/10/china-xinjiang-vote-failure-betrays-core-mission-of-un-human-rights-council/ Back to note
  21. Ambassador Chen Xu, remarks before the 6 October 2022 vote — https://www.axios.com/2022/10/06/un-human-rights-reject-debate-china-xinjiang-abuses Back to note
  22. IWGIA, The Indigenous World 2025: Russia (47 recognized Indigenous Small-Numbered Peoples; 40 of the North, Siberia, and the Far East; several near extinction) — https://iwgia.org/en/russia/5758-iw-2025-russia.html Back to note
  23. UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Russian Federation (Mariana Katzarova); mandate established by HRC Resolution 51/25 (7 October 2022) — https://www.ohchr.org/en/specialprocedures/sr-russian-federation ; September 2025 report and statement — https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/un-special-rapporteur-warns-intensifying-repression-and-widespread-torture . On disproportionate wartime mobilization of Indigenous and minority communities: ADC Memorial; Katzarova's reporting. Back to note
  24. Amnesty International, Urgent Action EUR 46/0875/2026 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur46/0875/2026/en/ ; FIDH–OMCT Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders — https://www.omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/russia-continued-arbitrary-detention-and-judicial-harassment-of-ms-daria-egereva-indigenous-peoples-rights-defender . Arrested 17 December 2025 (Art. 205.5); at least 17 activists searched the same day; detention extended through June 2026; ten UN special-procedure mandates issued a joint communication to Russia on 6 June 2026; she faces up to 20 years. Rights groups characterize the prosecution as retaliation for her advocacy. Back to note
  25. Joint statement of Indigenous organizations addressed to the President of the Russian Federation (SIRGE Coalition; Cultural Survival), December 2025 — https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/sirge-coalition-strongly-condemns-wrongful-arrest-indigenous-and-human-rights-defender-daria Back to note
  26. Human Rights Watch on China's 2024 Universal Periodic Review — https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/07/04/meaningful-follow-needed-chinas-un-rights-review-concludes ; on China's "dialogue over confrontation" posture (Chatham House; Vivekananda International Foundation). Back to note
  27. UNHCR mandate and the 1951 Refugee Convention; UNRWA, "Palestine refugees" — https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees ; UN, "Refugees" — https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/refugees ; UN General Assembly Resolution 302(IV) (8 December 1949), establishing UNRWA. Back to note
  28. UNRWA's own figures: ~750,000 at the agency's start (1950); ~5.9 million eligible today — https://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees Back to note
  29. UNRWA FAQ — https://www.unrwa.org/who-we-are/frequently-asked-questions — and UN "Refugees" page — https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/refugees — stating that descendant registration is standard refugee practice and that the two agencies have different mandates. Back to note

Version history

v1.0 — 14 June 2026. First published. Established the four-part case (membership of abusers; selective scrutiny; exemption of the powerful; the two-track refugee system), the Commission-to-Council history, and named testimony in each section. Live figures (Israel resolution count; Egereva case status; UNRWA registered population) verified current as of June 2026.

v1.1 — 14 June 2026. Added an "In brief" abstract after the standfirst — a scientific-study-style summary stating what the article documents, the four-part case with its headline facts and numbers, the argument, and the conclusion. Aligns with the house pattern for the programme long reads.

Future revisions are recorded here. The live figures above are the expected update points; when one changes, the relevant passage and source are updated, the date and version are incremented, and the change is noted in one line.

When the Accused Sit on the Bench · Reform UN! · Version 1.1 · Libera Mondo z.s.