Alena Douhan, a U.N. expert, has lobbied for rogue regimes against Western sanctions.
Alena Douhan, a U.N. expert, has lobbied for rogue regimes against Western sanctions.
C hina and Russia have directed funding to the office of Alena Douhan, a Belarusian academic who has used her appointment as one of the U.N.’s special rapporteurs to lobby openly on behalf of authoritarian regimes. The revelations have a powerful lawmaker calling for her ouster and a traditionally reticent State Department saying that her job should not even exist.
Douhan’s mandate as special rapporteur is to investigate the negative impact of unilaterally imposed economic sanctions on human rights. That framing was crafted by authoritarian regimes in 2015 in order to cast Western human-rights sanctions as illegal.
In Douhan, who is a professor specializing in international law at a university controlled by Belarus’s Lukashenko regime, they’ve found an ideologically simpatico partner who can use her U.N. title to attempt to delegitimize allegations of human-rights abuses against authoritarian regimes. Since her first appointment to the role in 2020, she has traveled to countries diplomatically aligned with Beijing and Moscow, given interviews to media outlets controlled by dictatorships, and promoted Chinese propaganda on the genocide of Uyghurs.
The revelations about the Chinese and Russian funding came in an annual report issued by the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights about the dozens of independent human-rights experts who each focus on a specific human-rights issue. That report was issued in March, but Douhan’s funding came to widespread attention only after the watchdog group U.N. Watch publicized it this week, attacking Douhan for her consistent efforts to exonerate brutal dictatorships for their activities.
In 2021, according to the report, her office received $200,000 in funding from China and $150,000 from Russia. While that may not sound like much money, China earmarked funding to only one of the other U.N. special rapporteur offices in 2021, at a lower amount.
U.N. special-rapporteur positions are unpaid, though private foundations, NGOs, and member states can opt to fund them. As a report by the European Journal of International Law noted last year, the experts who receive such earmarked funding often manage it themselves; in the U.N.’s opaquely managed human-rights system, that has created blatant conflicts of interest.
U.N. Watch called on Douhan to return China’s funding and said the payment was linked to a round of U.S. and allied sanctions targeting Chinese officials for the genocide of Uyghurs in 2021.
“It is clear that China is now willing to pay unprecedented sums of money to influence Alena Douhan’s U.N. human rights office, in wake of last year’s decision by the U.S., EU, UK and Canada to announce sanctions on China for its persecution of the Uyghurs,” said the group’s director, Hillel Neuer, in a statement.
The U.S. government alone has sanctioned dozens of officials, government entities, and companies that it says are complicit in the Xinjiang atrocities. Among the targets are Chen Quanguo, a former top party official in Xinjiang who was placed on one of the strictest U.S. sanctions lists, as well as major Chinese tech giants in fields as varied as video surveillance and genomics.
Douhan will continue to expand her work to cast that sanctions regime as illegal, some of her recent remarks suggest.
Last fall, Douhan took part in a propaganda event hosted by China’s U.N. Mission in Geneva, which was intended to dispel well-founded reports of systematic persecution in Xinjiang.
Joining a virtual panel that included China’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva and Chinese Communist Party officials in that region, who appeared under a banner that read “Xinjiang is a Wonderful Land,” Douhan said she was eager to learn about how Western sanctions have made an impact on the lives of people in Xinjiang. She told the event’s viewers that, in her view, over 99 percent of unilateral sanctions measures were put in place without any legal analysis and violate international legal principles.
China’s direct interaction with Douhan’s work is a relatively new phenomenon. Throughout the first part of her tenure, she made visits to Venezuela and Zimbabwe, producing reports that excoriated foreign sanctions imposed on those countries’ leaders for their purportedly destructive consequences.
She also issued reports describing most U.S. and Western-imposed sanctions as illegal, and took aim at the “Magnitsky” sanctions pioneered by the U.S. — targeted measures tailored to punish specific figures involved in human-rights abuses.
The revelation that she is building a case against international sanctions targeting Beijing, while accepting Chinese money, has not been lost on Washington.
A top Republican lawmaker is taking note and urging a more comprehensive approach toward combating this sort of malign authoritarian influence. In a statement to NR, Idaho senator Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called on U.N. secretary-general António Guterres to remove Douhan from her post because she throws the U.N.’s legitimacy into question.
“The Chinese Communist Party has a longstanding history of manipulating our international systems for its benefit,” Risch also said. “This is why ensuring we have the right tools to transparently track and combat malign influence must be a priority for the United States and those who share our commitment to a free and open democratic system.”
Meanwhile, a State Department spokesperson told National Review that the U.S. has opposed the very existence of Douhan’s job since the role was created and “votes against it at every appropriate opportunity.”
“The imposition of targeted sanctions does not violate human rights and is the sovereign decision of a State,” the spokesperson added, in an emailed statement. “In fact, targeted sanctions can be a powerful tool to promote human rights accountability for those who violate or abuse human rights.”