American taxpayers fund the United Nations. American diplomats built it. This week, the Geneva-based group UN Watch released the most thorough accounting yet of who actually pays the salaries and shapes the verdicts of the U.N.’s human rights enforcers. The short answer: not the United States.
The 104-page dossier, “From Watchdogs to Ideologues,” surveys 13 of the UN’s 59 Special Rapporteurs — the formally autonomous specialists whose findings carry near-judicial weight at the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Western foreign ministries, and across the global press. It documents not occasional ideological tilt but the wholesale capture of a Western-built institution by the regimes it was meant to constrain.
Three cases illustrate the machinery. Take Alena Douhan, whose U.N. brief — “unilateral coercive measures” — means U.S. and allied sanctions: she has banked $1.3 million from Beijing, Moscow, and Doha, taken every U.N. trip to a dictatorship, and reliably blamed Western sanctions rather than the regimes for whatever shortages her hosts displayed.
THE ‘PRO-PALESTINIAN’ LEFT ISN’T REALLY ABOUT GAZA. ITS REAL TARGET IS AMERICA
Irene Khan, the UN’s free-press monitor, is on the books of Wellspring Philanthropic Fund — a U.S. left-aligned donor outfit long criticized for opaque grant-making — for $775,000; her office has gone silent on Venezuela’s incarcerated journalists, Iran’s and Turkey’s internet blackouts, and Myanmar’s military censorship, while her flagship General Assembly submission zeroed in on the alleged suppression of pro-Palestinian activism on American and European campuses. And Ben Saul, the UN’s counterterrorism rapporteur, has cashed $150,000 from China; his record contains nothing on the camps holding more than a million Uyghur Muslims — though he has found time to call the United States, on the record, a “dystopia.”
The aggregate output is exactly what the financing implies. Across the 30 months from October 2023 to this past March, the Rapporteurs collectively issued 148 hostile statements against Israel. Russia, in the middle of an active war on Ukraine, drew 64. Myanmar’s junta, currently shelling its own civilians, drew 62. Sudan, suffering one of this century’s worst humanitarian catastrophes, drew a quarter as much.
The rot has spread. The International Criminal Court — whose chief prosecutor produced arrest warrants last year for the elected leader of a U.S. treaty partner — faces its own crisis. Last month, the Wall Street Journal disclosed an FBI witness statement alleging that Qatar promised ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan it would “look after” him in exchange for warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. On audio reviewed by the Journal, a Qatari intelligence officer makes the offer; Khan responds, “I want to issue the warrant, but I’m terrified to do it.” The Qatari: “If you do it, then we’ll look after you.” Khan, who issued the warrants weeks later, denies any quid pro quo.
Khan is not the ICC’s first prosecutor caught with foreign fingerprints on him. Luis Moreno Ocampo, the court’s inaugural chief prosecutor, was filmed last month — in footage published by Newsweek’s Romanian edition — walking through the mechanics of a paid lobbying campaign, financed by what he calls “Russian-Armenian representatives,” aimed at unseating Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan before his country’s June 7 vote. In the recording, Ocampo claimed to be coordinating with EU officials and U.S. Armenian diaspora organizations — the same lobby that this week denounced Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Yerevan as “U.S. election interference” and has railed against efforts to decouple Armenia from Moscow and Tehran.
The broader operation is no longer in dispute: OCCRP this week published leaked Kremlin files confirming Moscow is running a coordinated hybrid-warfare campaign against Pashinyan. The stakes are not abstract — they are President Donald Trump’s Armenia-Azerbaijan peace deal and the U.S.-controlled “Trump Route” corridor, a 99-year strategic foothold cutting Russia and Iran out of regional commerce.
The NGO class is rowing in the same direction. Kenneth Roth built Human Rights Watch over three decades into one of the world’s most reliable critics of Israel — and of the United Arab Emirates, whose 2024 trial of 84 dissidents drew more HRW condemnation than China’s million-Uyghur camp system. He now barnstorms Western capitals on behalf of the new International Observatory for Democracy in Armenia, urging Washington and Brussels not to back Pashinyan.
Yet while Roth churns out reports on Armenia’s “democratic backsliding,” the full-scale Russian information warfare campaign against Yerevan, channeled through compromised Armenian Apostolic clergy, information warfare campaigns, and Russian-backed oligarchs, barely warrants a footnote in his writing. The “authoritarianism” Roth identifies as Armenia’s defining crisis is, in plain language, a prime minister who dared to sign peace with Azerbaijan and align with Washington.
HATING AMERICA IS A DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF DEMOCRATS
The pattern is the same across every dossier. Institutions Western democracies built to constrain authoritarian regimes are, through capture and corruption, now performing those regimes’ political work. They prosecute Israel. They condemn the Emirates. They cover for Beijing’s camps and Moscow’s wars. And they save their loudest moral fire for the governments that have chosen Washington over its rivals.
Congress has the leverage to treat this as the national-security problem it is. Impose Magnitsky-style penalties on every rapporteur the U.N. Watch dossier names. Suspend U.S. contributions to any U.N. body that refuses an independent funding audit and a removal procedure. Revoke the tax-exempt status of donor outfits like Wellspring that buy international officials in our name. And recognize Israel today, the UAE tomorrow, Armenia next week as one campaign — with Washington as its ultimate target.
Joseph Epstein is the Director of the Turan Research Center, which is hosted by the DC-based Yorktown Institute.