The UN is being used as a weapon against the West

A new report from UN Watch – an independent NGO monitoring the work of the United Nations – has confirmed what many of us have long suspected. Namely, that UN human-rights experts are increasingly apologists for terrorists and authoritarians.

The report, From Watchdogs to Ideologues, profiles 13 of the UN’s so-called independent experts. It reveals a corrupt system that is enabling the world’s worst human-rights violators. It documents how these so-called experts – trading on the title of ‘special rapporteur’ – routinely serve the interests of Beijing, Tehran and Moscow, while treating the democratic West as the primary threat to human rights.

The report really needs to be read to be believed. Michael Fakhri, special rapporteur on the right to food, praised the Venezuelan dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro after visiting the country in 2025. Yet, at the same time, he accused Canada of committing a ‘genocide’ against its indigenous people. Fakhri led the charge internationally to accuse Israel of pursuing a deliberate policy of starvation in Gaza, yet said nothing about Hamas’s visible starvation of returned Israeli hostages.

The case of Alena Douhan, the special rapporteur on ‘unilateral coercive measures’, isn’t much better. Douhan has taken a surprisingly lenient attitude to Russian sanctions, and as recently as 2024 was criticising them for having negative consequences on the ‘global south’. During her tenure, Douhan has accepted more than $250,000 from the Russian government and more than $900,000 from the Chinese government.

The expert on ‘democratic and equitable international order’ – George Katrougalos – received $100,000 from China in 2025. Not long after, we find him praising Xi Jinping’s ‘vision’, and meeting with Iranian regime officials to lament American ‘crimes’. He even advocated for a permanent Security Council seat for what he called the ‘Muslim world’.

The systemic rot extends far beyond the rapporteurs (and there are many more instances in the report). Let’s not forget that Iran was handed oversight of UN women’s rights, while China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia control the committee that decides which human-rights groups get access to the UN. And then there is UNRWA – the UN’s refugee agency, some of whose staff participated in the 7 October massacre.

The UN’s obsession with Israel seems to be getting more deranged by the day. Recently, it placed Israel on its blacklist of countries and parties that used sexual violence as a weapon of war. So Israel, a liberal democracy, now sits on the same list as Hamas – whose 7 October atrocities included systematic rape and sexual torture – and ISIS. The situation could hardly be any more absurd.

UN Watch calls for ‘major reform’. I understand the instinct, but you cannot reform a rotting corpse. The problem is that the UN continually hands influence to regimes that abuse human rights most egregiously, granting authoritarian propaganda a veneer of legitimacy. Every time Western governments treat UN reports as serious documents – or allow tyrants control of key councils without objection – they signal to the world that this system has credibility. It doesn’t.

The UN has become one of the most dangerous instruments in modern geopolitics. Authoritarian regimes are using the UN’s prestige to normalise their behavior, conceal their crimes and peddle anti-Western propaganda. It should terrify all of us that the world’s most trusted watchdog has been successfully leveraged as a PR firm for tyrants.

The time for decisive action is now. One way for democracies to reclaim control is by freezing funding, forcing audits, and purging compromised staff who are actively on the payroll of hostile regimes.

The UN was built to protect civilisation. It is now being used as a weapon against it. Going along with the charade only plays into the hands of our enemies.

Limor Simhony Philpott is a writer, policy adviser and researcher.