Her interview with the Grayzone on Thursday marks a new low.
In the latest episode demonstrating how authoritarian regimes and their advocates have weaponized the U.N. system, Alena Douhan, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures, granted an interview this week to a fringe website that peddles genocide-denial content.
As I noted in my previous writing about Douhan’s work, her role was created by a 2014 U.N. Human Rights Council resolution authored by Iran and pushed by China, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and others. Since its creation, the office has served as an attack dog that acts on behalf of those regimes to inscribe a perverse understanding of sanctions and human rights into the international legal lexicon. As the watchdog group U.N. Watch has pointed out, the previous holder of the position, Idriss Jazairy, a former Algerian U.N. representative, fought to silence other U.N. human-rights rapporteurs.
Douhan, a professor at Belarusian State University, is the second person to hold the role, and since starting the job in March, she’s granted several interviews to the state-run media of Belarus, Iran, Russia, and China. In these interviews, she dismisses Western-backed sanctions as detrimental to the well-being of the people of the targeted countries.
Her interview with the Grayzone on Thursday marks a new low. Her argument, condemning the new U.S. sanctions targeting the Assad regime, is nothing out of the ordinary for her. What’s most revealing, however, is her willingness to speak to the Grayzone at all.
The website has earned a reputation for pugnaciously defending the perpetrators of mass atrocities. Its series denying the existence of concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang region promotes falsehoods that echo Chinese government talking points (indeed, Chinese diplomats regularly cite Grayzone articles to falsely claim that Uyghurs are not being arbitrarily detained and forced into slave labor). These claims misrepresent the research that shows that some one million individuals have been sent to these 21st-century gulags, and they elide the other evidence that proves this, such as the testimony of victims, satellite imagery, and leaked Chinese government documents. There’s no way around it: The Grayzone peddles genocide denialism.
The Grayzone has also carried water for Syrian-government narratives that deny the existence of certain chemical-weapons attacks, and its reporting has been used to falsely argue that the Assad government has never used sarin gas during the country’s civil war.
But perhaps the most obvious example of the website’s cheerleading for Assad came when Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal joined a Syrian government-sponsored press junket to the country in 2019. Upon his arrival, he posted a selfie from Damascus — and just behind him was a building from which snipers shot peaceful demonstrators in 2011. Less than a kilometer away was a notorious mass-torture facility operated by the government.
Of course, the Grayzone’s antics didn’t bother Douhan, whose reports on sanctions offer plenty of criticism for Western governments and none at all for the authoritarian regimes for whom she speaks. One such document, a report that she presented to the U.N. General Assembly’s human- rights committee in October, is remarkably one-sided, essentially allowing Belarus, Cuba, Venezuela, and others to use her office as a conduit through which to launder their grievances.
Take her treatment of Belarus as an example. In one part of the report that cites the country’s mission to the U.N. as a source, she argues that “unilateral sanctions” discriminate against the residents of the target countries. But there’s no mention of the fact that many of these measures target specific individuals for their involvement in the Lukashenko government’s crackdown on demonstrators protesting its work to rig last year’s presidential election.
Viewed in this light, it’s unsurprising that when Belarus’s foreign minister addressed the U.N. General Assembly this year, he made remarkably similar points decrying the “harmful” nature of Western sanctions.
There’s been a fusion of the work of such reprehensible governments with the allies that they’ve created at the U.N. and the sympathetic media figures who bring their disinformation to Western audiences. Effectively, through the work of Douhan and others, authoritarian regimes have been able to use the U.N.’s human-rights work to their gain, manufacturing legitimacy for their rule at home. The sad thing is that this undermines the solid work conducted by other U.N. human-rights experts to call out atrocities in North Korea, Venezuela, and, yes, Belarus.
But the placement of officials with authoritarian sympathies and a penchant for engaging with media outlets that play a role in authoritarian propaganda networks speaks to the danger that these regimes will exert ever more sway at the U.N.