China, Russia Contributed Funding to U.N.’s Pro-Dictator Rapporteur

China 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.