Major-power cutbacks and delayed payments amidst conflict and insecurity are testing the very principles and frameworks upon which the international human rights infrastructure was built nearly 80 years ago. Human rights need defending now more than ever, which is why the United Nations leadership needs to ensure that its efforts to cut costs don’t jeopardize the UN’s critical human rights work.
The Trump administration’s review of US engagement with multilateral organizations and its refusal to pay assessed UN contributions—which account for 22 percent of the UN’s regular budget—have pushed the cash-strapped international organization into a full-blown financial crisis. China, the second biggest contributor, continues to pay but has been delaying payments, exacerbating the UN’s years-long liquidity crisis. With widespread layoffs looming, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been forced to dig deep for cost-saving measures.
A six-page memo seen by Human Rights Watch—entitled “UN80 structural changes and programmatic realignment” and marked as “Strictly Confidential”—outlines proposals for eliminating redundancies and unnecessary costs across the UN.
The proposals include consolidating apparently overlapping mandates, reducing the UN’s presence in expensive locations like New York City, and cutting some senior posts.
While some UN80 proposals have merit, the section on human rights is worrying. It suggests downgrading and cutting several senior human rights posts and merging different activities. But at a time when rights crises are multiplying and populist leaders hostile to rights are proliferating, any reduction of the UN’s human rights capacities would be shortsighted.
Efficiency and cost-effectiveness are important, but the UN’s human rights work has long been grossly underfunded and understaffed. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights gets just 5 percent of the UN’s regular budget. Countless lives depend on its investigations and monitoring, which help deter abuses in often ignored or inaccessible locales. Investigations of war crimes and other atrocities in places like Sudan, Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and elsewhere are already struggling amidst a UN-wide hiring freeze and pre-Trump liquidity shortfall.
For years, Russia and China have lobbied to defund the UN’s human rights work. There is now a risk that the United States, which has gutted its own funding for human rights worldwide, will no longer oppose these efforts and will instead enable them.
During these trying times, the UN should be reminding the world that its decades-long commitment to human rights is unwavering.
