Advocating for human rights in the halls and corridors of United Nations headquarters is not easy, but it’s what some of us do every day. Most global crises and conflicts involving human rights abuses end up on the agenda of one or more UN body or agency. It could be the Security Council, General Assembly, or Human Rights Council. Or one of the humanitarian agencies like the World Food Program, the UN children’s fund UNICEF, the World Health Organization, UN Mine Action Service, or the UN population fund UNFPA. And if the UN leadership and member countries don’t take up an urgent human rights issue, groups like Human Rights Watch and our partners will try to pressure them until they do.
It’s no exaggeration, though, to say that civil society is struggling at the UN. Although the role of nongovernmental organizations is mentioned explicitly in Article 71 of the UN Charter, some member state governments would love to show human rights groups the door.
The challenges to meaningful participation of human rights and other civil society groups at the UN remain significant. Just getting access to the UN can seem impossible these days.
Bona fide human rights organizations working at the UN regularly issue reports and make public statements with uncomfortable facts that many governments or humanitarian organizations are afraid to say out loud. We don’t have an agenda, apart from speaking the truth and advocating for positive change and accountability.
Human rights research and advocacy is an essential service that UN officials, national delegations and journalists can’t provide in the way independent organizations like ours do. Staffed with country experts, lawyers, former diplomats, former journalists, former members of the military, doctors, scientists and others with specialized knowledge, many human rights groups publish detailed reports about human rights violations or war crimes, and offer recommendations for action. We combine field research with open source and satellite, digital and data analysis, and then bring it to governments and international organizations to press for change and accountability.
Whether it’s the deliberate denial of food and water to the more than two million people in the Gaza Strip that amounts to acts of genocide or revelations of Russian atrocities against civilians in the Ukrainian town of Bucha, independent human rights organizations bring UN member states perspective they often don’t get from the UN or member state governments.
Unlike journalists, in addition to reporting the facts, we offer recommendations for action – whether it’s targeted sanctions by the Security Council, referral to the International Criminal Court, or an independent UN investigation. Sometimes our recommendations seem ambitious to the point of being unrealistic. That’s not because we’re naive. It’s because our job is to press governments to set aside narrow political interests and comply with their obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law. Many governments bristle at the prospect of living up to their legal obligations.
When the UN Security Council is paralyzed like it is on Sudan, Israel/Palestine and other crises characterized by massive atrocities, war crimes and other abuses, we criticize their inaction. We try to shame the member states responsible for the council’s inaction and recommend urgent steps to take. If that doesn’t work, we may seek action at the General Assembly or Human Rights Council where no one has a veto to prevent action.
A Proliferation of Human Rights Crises
Human rights advocacy inside and outside the UN has probably never been more necessary. Human rights and laws-of-war violations, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities are taking place in countless spots around the world – Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, China, and Ukraine, just to name a few.
Populist politicians who sneer at the idea of upholding human rights are increasingly popular and influential in democratic countries. They get elected on racially charged promises of deporting immigrants and tossing out protections for women and minorities. Poverty and inequality are growing, while wealthy governments are backsliding on their commitments to address climate change and mitigate its devastating impacts on vulnerable people around the world.
Human rights have been central to the work of the United Nations from the beginning. Conceived amidst the horrors of the Second World War, the United States, United Kingdom and other founding governments aspired to replace the failed League of Nations with an international organization that could prevent another world war and deliver consistent results on the UN’s three pillars: peace and security, economic development, and human rights.
The memories of the Nazi murder of millions of Jews, Roma and Sinti, gay and transgender people, people with disabilities, and so many others were fresh in the minds of UN delegates when the organization began its work 80 years ago. After the UN’s founding in 1945, Eleanor Roosevelt, the late US president’s widow, led negotiations on the groundbreaking Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN General Assembly adopted it as a resolution in 1948.
It’s a text that is just as relevant today as it was eight decades ago. It says that “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” And it calls for a world in which “human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want.”
What exactly is human rights advocacy at the UN?
The establishment of a UN body focusing on grave crimes committed in Syria is a good example of one of our bigger collective human rights successes at the UN. In 2016, a group of human rights advocates were discussing how appalled we were at the inability of the UN Security Council to agree on action to address the mounting atrocities in Syria. Syrian and Russian forces, with support from Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters, were indiscriminately bombing civilians in the northern Aleppo region and preventing humanitarian aid and evacuations. Syrian forces were using chemical weapons against civilians.
At that point, Russia had already vetoed five resolutions on Syria, four of them with China joining in. One of those failed resolutions would have asked the Security Council to refer the situation in Syria to the International Criminal Court.
Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations began calling for the General Assembly to step in where the Security Council was failing. We held a news conference for the UN press corps. Eventually 223 civil society organizations from around the world issued a public call on the General Assembly to act. Canada picked up the baton. On December 9, 2016, the General Assembly adopted a Canadian-drafted resolution condemning the atrocities in Syria and calling for accountability.
Two weeks later, Liechtenstein backed by Qatar took an even bolder step and circulated a second General Assembly resolution on Syria – one that put serious teeth on the calls for accountability. On December 21, 2016, the General Assembly voted to establish the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM), a body tasked with gathering and preserving evidence of serious crimes and preparing case files for future judicial proceedings.
Russia was furious but was unable to stop the creation of the IIIM since there’s no veto in the General Assembly. It then tried to persuade UN member states to withhold funding, but we successfully lobbied member states to keep funding the mechanism.
In 2022, a German court convicted a former Syrian intelligence official of crimes against humanity. The prosecution used information and evidence provided by the Independent Mechanism. Its staff is still hard at work and has engaged with a number of judicial officials regarding ongoing cases related to Syria. The head of the IIIM traveled to Damascus in December 2024, exactly eight years after it was established. The creation of the IIIM is a great example of the powerful results we can get when human rights groups and governments that care about human rights and accountability find a way to work together at the UN. Not even the five veto powers can stop us.
Civil Society Under Attack
Although top UN officials often speak about the importance of civil society, the organization’s leadership demonstrated how much it values human rights when they used the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to bar accredited groups from entering UN headquarters for nearly two years – long after UN officials, delegates, journalists, and even tourists were allowed back in.
Fortunately, civil society has its champions. In New York City, Costa Rica and Denmark have led a group of at least 61 member states that have actively advocated for the expansion and improvement of civil society access at the UN. And some top UN officials are genuinely supportive of the role of civil society and want us in the room.
In 1945, 41 nongovernmental organizations were accredited to the UN. By 1992, that number had grown to over 700. As of December 31, 2022, 6,343 organizations had been accredited. But getting that accreditation to attend and participate in UN conferences, events and meetings has become almost impossible for human rights organizations. That is due to the UN’s notorious NGO Committee.
The UN Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations is the gatekeeper for civil society organizations seeking ECOSOC “consultative status.” The NGO Committee – which includes governments with abysmal human rights records like China, Cuba, and Nicaragua – is especially hostile to human rights groups.
While India’s human rights record might not put it in a league with the likes of China, Russia, Cuba, or Nicaragua, it used its seat on the NGO Committee to keep the International Dalit Solidarity Network (IDSN) outside the UN for 15 years by repeatedly asking it questions and deferring its application for ECOSOC “consultative status” from one session to the next. IDSN advocates for the elimination of caste discrimination and other forms of discrimination around the world.
The NGO Committee kept the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a highly regarded New York-based media freedom group, in limbo for more than four years until the US succeeded in bringing its case to the ECOSOC plenary. In 2018, CPJ finally got its UN accreditation, ending what the organization’s former executive director described as a “Kafkaesque” experience.
Many NGOs aren’t as lucky as the CPJ or IDSN. According to the NGO Committee’s own data, it deferred 323 NGO applications for UN accreditation at its May-June 2024 session. But even once an organization gets a UN accreditation, some states regularly try to muzzle the voices of civil society and restrict or prevent our ability to participate in UN debates and conferences. The UN secretariat has an unnecessary and counterproductive practice of largely barring NGOs from UN headquarters during the General Assembly’s annual gathering of world leaders every September. Civil society often faces new security measures that apply only to us, not to UN delegations and journalists. There have been numerous cases of government reprisals against human rights defenders who cooperate with UN bodies, including the Security Council, Human Rights Council and the various treaty bodies.
Occasionally oppressive governments get assistance from the UN. For example, UN officials removed criticisms of the Saudi government from the official record of a UN-organized internet governance conference in Riyadh in December 2024 and retaliated against civil society organizations.
What Can Be Done?
Imagine a UN without human rights groups wandering its halls and corridors. You’d have no one in the conference rooms filling the huge factual gaps left by governments condemning the abuses of their adversaries while turning a blind eye to the abuses of their friends – like Russia did for Syria while President Bashar al-Assad was in power or the US does for Israel. There would be no one in the room taking UN officials to task for not mentioning the Chinese authorities’ crimes against humanity against Uyghurs to avoid angering Beijing. You’d have fewer voices prepared to call out senior UN officials for holding back criticism of abuses of the Trump administration out of fears it will cut off funds for many UN agencies and activities.
Of course, you’ll hear governments like Russia, Israel, Rwanda, or China saying that human rights groups are anti-Russian, anti-Israel, anti-Rwanda, or anti-China. Since they can’t challenge us on the facts, they try to discredit us with false accusations of bias.
Good human rights advocates like to be diplomatic but the gruesome facts about war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are never diplomatic. They’re shocking, appalling. We speak about them loudly and clearly. It’s why some governments would like to see us shut out of the UN, defunded, and closed down.
A former colleague once aptly explained to me what it means to be a human rights advocate at the UN: “We’re the skunk at the garden party.”
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