Here in Israel we are very aware of the degraded state of the United Nations. Most U.N. countries have governments run by dictators, tyrants, juntas, theocrats, military factions, failed states, kleptocrats and kakistocrats. A minority of the member countries are democracies and many of the democracies have become weak-kneed and muddle-headed.
Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, South Africa and North Korea and a hundred other awful governments each have a vote in the U.N. General Assembly equal to the vote of the United States. Free and democratic countries are the exception in the U.N., not the rule.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission(UNHRC) is one of the most degraded and dishonest of the U.N. agencies. That UNHCR has appointed multiple ‘special rapporteurs’ to issue reports on what are supposed to be human rights related issues. The United States refuses to participate in the U.N. Human Rights Commission, seeing it for the fraud that it is.
The UNHCR has given a platform to one of the most openly vicious and dishonest Jew-haters of our age, the vile Francesca Albanese-Goebbels (the Goebbels is my addition, m.k.), who is nominally a ‘special rapporteur’ about human rights. In fact, her job is to defame, slander, lie about, denigrate and curse Israel, which she does overtly and shamelessly.
As it turns out Albanese-Goebbels is not the only propagandist and polemicist who currently works as a ‘special rapporteur’ for the UNHCR. In U.N. Watch’s new report about abuses perpetrated by some of the ‘special rapporteurs’ entitled From Watchdogs to Ideologues: How Politicized U.N. Rapporteurs Are Subverting Human Rights, U.N. Watch shows that the United Nations has deployed an entire ideological and moral freak show of anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Israel and pro-totalitarian ideologues to advance the agenda of the worst countries in the world.
U.N. Watch is unique among Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in that it has a very modest mission: to hold the U.N. to the principles of its founding charter. U.N. Watch is led by the wonderfully intelligent, polite, factual and diplomatic Hillel Neuer. Mr. Neuer is a model of decency, honesty, integrity and knowledge about the functioning of the U.N. and fearlessly shows how it routinely fails to live up to the high principles it claims to support.
If there were a Nobel Prize for political courage in the face of adversity, confronting the habitually lying mouthpieces of dictatorial regimes and calling out hypocrisy, dishonesty and Jew-hatred among the nations, Mr. Neuer and U.N. Watch would win the prize in a landslide U.N. Watch just wants to see the U.N. behave like the honorable institution it was supposed to be instead of the ugly clubhouse for dictators, tyrants and bullies it has become.
Every factual assertion that the U.N. Watch report makes is carefully documented in footnotes and every conclusion that the report draws follows naturally from the facts. Generally, the report finds that the rapporteurs are steeped in anti-Western bias, portraying the West and particularly the United States as a source of global injustice. Recurring features of this bias include the repeated use of conspiratorial and exaggerated condemnations against the West and the U.S., disproportionate social media attacks against Western countries while giving the worst offenders a pass, using ugly and profane language and ad hominem attacks on Western leaders and having ties to authoritarian regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia and Qatar.
The ‘rapporteurs’ are also obsessed with demonizing Israel, are products of a politicized appointment process, have had expanding mandates that are designed to criticize the West, have no honest evidentiary standards for what they will accept as true and what they claim to be facts, are not really independent because they rely both on outside financial contributions-including from corrupt and authoritarian states who they should really be reporting about- from ideologically driven foundations and and by the central office of the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
The ‘rapporteurs’ have no transparency in their funding and are not accountable to anyone other than the committee of malicious countries that they serve.
The report also gives examples of thirteen of these ‘rapporteurs’ to show just how awful the abuses of this system have become. Here, for the sake of brevity, we will discuss just four of them.
-Irene Khan is the ‘Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression.’ A Bangladeshi Moslem, Ms. Khan was appointed by a committee led by China. She has maintained close relations with China, visiting there often. She has condemned Western democracies for allegedly stifling dissent about "Palestine" and has argued that American universities have a duty to support student protesters against Israel.
On the other hand, she was silent about the Maduro regime’s jailing and killing dissenters in Venezuela, Turkey’s shutting down its internet for periods during 2022, 2023 and 2025 to stifle dissent, Iran’s butchery of dissidents during the 2022 uprising over the Masa Amini protests, Myanmar and China’s abuse of dissenters in those regimes and Saudi Arabia’s jailing of dissidents. She defended Hamas-affiliated al-Jazeera fake ‘journalists,’ and condemned Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah as a supposed ‘violation of international law.’ She also claims that ‘anti-palestinian racism’ is used to suppress free speech, an odd idea since there is no such thing as a ‘palestinian race.’
-Tialeng Mofokeng is the ‘Special Rapporteur about the Right to Health Care.’ A South African doctor, her mandate at the U.N. was to research and report on the right to health care throughout the world. ‘Instead Mofokeng actively promotes prostitution to teens, blatantly violates the U.N. Code of Conduct and core professional standards and explicitly denies Israel’s right to exist.’ She consistently denounces the West, particularly the U.S. and has called President Trump a ‘fascist’ and American foreign aid to poorer countries ‘neocolonialism.’
When former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak issued a statement about immigration, this foul-mouthed individual called him ‘filthy’ and ‘drunk and f---ed up.’
She has praised the Cuban regime and Che Guevara, written an article for Teen Vogue urging teenage girls to consider prostitution as an occupation (She really did that!), has engaged in racist and foul-mouthed abuse of those who disagree with her (telling one person in a public forum about covid vaccines to ‘shove it up you’re a**’) and has referred to Mr. Neuer of U.N. watch as ‘evil scum,’ and a ‘white man’ when U.N. Watch suggested that she be disciplined for her bad behavior.
Of course, she has perpetuated the lie of an Israeli genocide in Gaza and called for BDS and isolation of Israel even though those have nothing to do with her U.N. mandate. She also openly supported Hamas terrorists and her fellow U.N. rapporteur Francesca Alabanese-Goebbels.
-Alena Douhan took the job of ‘Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures and Human Rights’ in her own country, a position created at the insistence of Iran and its allies over the objection of all democracies. She is a Belarussian lawyer who had held other posts at the U.N.
What are ‘Unilateral coercive measures?’ They are sanctions imposed by such countries as the U.S., Britain and by the European Union on their worst enemies and on habitually murderous and expansionist regimes such as Iran. Funding for the position has routinely come from Russia, China and Qatar.
Even though sanctions are often imposed in support of human rights by the U.S. and other democracies, the U.N. Human Rights Council takes the opposite position, at least when it comes to sanctions against despots, tyrannies and juntas. The point of the U.N.’s position is to defend authoritarian regimes and use the power and platform of the U.N. to denounce democracies. After a visit to Iran some years ago, for instance, Ms. Douhan claimed that all of Iran’s social and economic problems are due to the sanctions on that country, not to its corruption, repression, cultural backwardness, aggressive expansionism and Sharia Supremacist mullah-ocracy.
-Reem Alsalem is the ‘Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls’ since 2021 and is a long-term Lebanese employee of the UN Human Rights Council. She follows in the footsteps of the prior holder of this position who once claimed publicly that when Palestinian Arab men beat their wives it is Israel’s fault. She has refused to acknowledge the October 7, 2023 massacre, denied the use of sexual violence that day against Israeli women and girls and amplified Hamas-aligned propaganda. She has received substantial funding from Arab countries that are particularly repressive and misogynistic like Saudi Arabia.
In November, 2025 she publicly and falsely proclaimed that ‘no independent investigation found that rape took place on October 7’ even though a different U.N. agency had specifically made that finding. She even refused to acknowledge that some of Hamas’ own videos showed sexual crimes against women and girls, claiming that she ‘was not an expert on videos.’ In the meantime, with no substantial corroboration or evidence, she joined Francesca Albanese-Goebbels in issuing a statement accusing Israeli soldiers of sexually abusing Palestinian Arab women. She has called Israel ‘depraved’ ‘genocidal’ and made a host of other false, malicious and dishonest allegations against Israel.
That was four out of thirteen, all similar.
If this short recitation of what these rapporteurs are doing begins to look like there is some pattern to it, that is because there is a pattern to it. They are little more than mouthpieces and advocates for the terrible regimes that have a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission and that are U.N. members. They intend to further the goals of those regimes. Interestingly, this report only speaks about Francesca Albanese-Goebbels incidentally, since she is so soaked in malice that she gets a separate report all her own.
It is a mark of U.N. Watch’s decency and optimism that it suggests some proposals for reform of the special rapporteur system at the U.N. Among the recommendations are that democratic states form an alternative body to ‘jointly assess and publicly rate’ special rapporteurs, that there be a comprehensive review of mandates given to rapporteurs so that they are not so easily used for illegitimate purposes, that there be an independent vetting process by democratic countries for candidates for these positions, that there be a more transparent funding process with no nations and advocacy groups contributing directly to the rapporteurs, and that there be serious evidentiary requirements for the rapporteurs to claim that a matter is a fact.
Those recommendations all assume, however, that the process can be corrected and that it is worth saving even though the majority of U.N. member countries will still be tyrannies, dictatorships, juntas, theocracies and worse. That is an optimistic assumption that some of us are not willing to make.
The full report is available at : https://unwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/From -Watchdogs-to-Ideologues.pdf
Michael Krampner, a retired American trial lawyer, who also earned a Ph.D. In Jewish history, lives in Jerusalem where he is improving his Hebrew, learning traditional Jewish texts, reading widely on historical and political subjects and is engaged with family.
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