For-sale UN ‘experts’ weaponize human rights to serve tyranny

 Israel’s defenders have warned for years that the United Nations, an institution that lectures democracies while shielding dictators, has been bent into a weapon against the Jewish state.

This week, the evidence hit — and it’s worse than even the cynics imagined.

It turns out that the United Nations and the global “human rights” apparatus writ large have been hijacked by bad actors intent on subverting the United States, its allies and the West as a whole.

And their antisemitism has been the pungent whiff of gas signaling a dangerous leak.

On Tuesday, the Geneva-based group UN Watch released “From Watchdogs to Ideologues,” a 104-page investigation into 13 of the UN’s 59 Special Rapporteurs — the supposedly independent human-rights monitors whose findings are routinely treated as authoritative by the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Western governments and Western media.

The picture is damning.

he office of Alena Douhan, the UN’s rapporteur on “unilateral coercive measures” — whose mandate, in plain English, is to attack Western sanctions on dictators — has accepted $1.3 million from China, Russia and Qatar.

Her official UN “fact-finding” visits have taken her exclusively to the capitals of authoritarian states: Tehran, Beijing, Damascus, Doha, Caracas, Havana, Harare.

Her UN reports have, with remarkable consistency, blamed Western sanctions for those regimes’ lack of food, medicine and economic stability — while ignoring their corruption, repression and systemic failures.

UN Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression Irene Khan’s office took $775,000 from the Wellspring Foundation, a left-wing American dark-money outfit.

While accepting this payout, the world’s official UN monitor of free speech has produced no major report on Venezuela’s jailing of journalists, on Myanmar’s junta, or on the systematic internet shutdowns of Iran and Turkey.

Before her appointment, Khan visited China repeatedly — and publicly praised its Belt and Road Initiative.

Her major recent General Assembly report accused Western universities and Western governments of suppressing pro-Palestinian campus protests.

The office of Ben Saul, the UN’s rapporteur on counterterrorism, took $150,000 from China — and has yet to produce a single statement on the imprisonment of more than a million Uyghurs in Beijing’s “re-education” camps.

Saul has called the United States a “dystopia” and has boosted claims that Western civilization is “killing life on Earth.”

George Katrougalos, the UN’s “independent expert on a democratic and equitable international order,” collected $100,000 from China in 2025, his office’s annual report shows.

He then publicly hawked Xi Jinping’s book and flew to Tehran to commiserate with the regime’s foreign minister about American and Israeli “crimes.”

Michael Fakhri, the rapporteur on the right to food, accepted a rare invitation from Venezuela’s then-dictator Nicolás Maduro to visit Caracas in 2024, where he lavished praise on the regime and cast it as a victim of US sanctions.

The output of this capture is a United Nations where Israel has become the obsession — and destruction of the West the constant subtext.

Between Oct. 7, 2023 and March 2026, UN Special Rapporteurs issued 148 statements targeting Israel — more than twice the number on Russia’s war against Ukraine (64) or on Myanmar (62), and six times the number on Sudan’s civil war (24),

Yet none of these officials has been removed: The UN’s Human Rights Council has no procedure to remove them.

There is no independent audit of their funding, and no ethics review of their statements.

As UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer put it, if a judge took $1.3 million from one of the parties in a case, he’d be disqualified on the spot; if a journalist endorsed a terror group on social media, she’d be fired that same afternoon.

At the UN, rapporteurs operate with not just diplomatic immunity, but complete impunity.

And this problem is not the UN’s alone: The broader international governance architecture is infected, too.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Qatar promised ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan that the regime would “look after” him if he indicted Benjamin Netanyahu — which he then did.

The same enemies of America. The same payoffs.

If antisemitism is the gas leak, the fire is the capture of the West’s own institutions by the regimes those institutions were built to constrain.

Beijing, Moscow, Tehran and Doha have figured out that buying a UN rapporteur is cheaper than buying a fighter jet, and yields better returns.

“Human rights” letterhead is one of the world’s most profitable laundering services.

Washington should treat it accordingly.

Sanction the rapporteurs who took the money.

Defund the institutions that refuse to reform.

And stop pretending the assault on Israel is a Jewish problem: It is the early warning.

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center.

https://nypost.com/2026/05/28/opinion/for-sale-un-experts-weaponize-human-rights-to-serve-tyranny/