In a world dominated by great powers, the UN human rights system still has one last lifeline: strength in numbers, writes Raphaël Viana David, human rights advocate at the International Service for Human Rights.
Mark Carney’s recent Davos speech captured, with unusual candour, a difficult truth: the world is reorganising around great-power competition outside UN rules. For everyone else, racing to please one or both sides is a losing game. The latest outbursts of Trumpian imperialism in Venezuela, Iran and over Greenland did not create this dynamic, but pushed it into the open, reinforcing instincts to hide behind fortresses rather than invest in collective rules.
Major powers have trampled international law before, but seldom with such naked disdain. The enforcement of international law and human rights has always relied less on policing power than on moral leverage and the political will of influential states. Both are rapidly eroding as slashed aid funds, weakened economies and frail credibility over double standards on Gaza’s genocide and US aggressions hollow out part of the west’s ability to lead.
Meanwhile, rich, rights-averse states like China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates continue to grow in influence. The rest are busy navigating a fractured landscape, leaving human rights multilateralism largely defenceless.
This is compounded by the UN’s liquidity crisis, with Trump holding the organisation’s finances hostage just as Beijing and Moscow seek to defund its human rights work. But let’s be clear. This is not a UN crisis – it is a states’ crisis. Blaming the institution for the failures of its members lets governments off the hook.
China’s distorted multilateralism
Unilateralism creates a vacuum, and Beijing has moved methodically to fill it where the US had withdrawn. Its new coalition, the Group of Friends of Global Governance, recently launched at the General Assembly, offers appealing promises of “true multilateralism”. But China’s playbook is well documented by those of us who closely observe UN spaces: gutting human rights budgets, punishing those who cooperate with the UN, rewriting progressive rights standards, opposing inquiries into atrocity crimes and reshaping the system around friendly intergovernmental cooperation instead of scrutiny. It was Chinese and Saudi lobbying that produced the two only occasions in the Human Rights Council’s history where initiatives on mass atrocities – in Xinjiang and Yemen, respectively – were ever defeated by a vote. Beijing is now building support for an upcoming declaration at the Council on Global Human Rights Governance.
But our desperation to find alternatives to US leadership shouldn’t rush us into the arms of tomorrow’s despots and a distorted vision of multilateralism stripped of meaningful human rights scrutiny. Instead, we need committed human rights actors to rise.
Human rights progress has never depended solely on great-power benevolence. It was also built on the power of truth-seeking, public pressure, stories that appeal to our common humanity and committed individuals and movements.
The UN remains a crucial space
The UN remains central to this theory of change. Dismissals of the UN as broken or biased miss the whole truth. Despite severe constraints, UN human rights bodies continue to deliver tangible impact, assisting governments in improving laws and policies, in areas ranging from AI to climate change to fiscal justice. In a fragmented world, the HRC is also a rare space for dialogue among governments, able to investigate atrocities that the Security Council has failed to address.
Arrangements imposed through force or unilateral action may offer short-term stability, but ignoring human rights root causes merely defers conflict, which is why the Board of Peace and similar elitist pay-to-play clubs that seek to manage conflicts like real estate investments are doomed to fail. They can, however, inflict much damage on the UN’s legitimacy if we don’t react.
If the problem lies with states, so does the solution. This is where the Carney doctrine matters. At the UN, small and medium states alike hold real power under the one-country-one-vote principle. Global south nations played a pivotal role in shaping a fairer, more democratic UN system, advancing decolonisation, forging stronger human rights standards and ending inter-state conflict in regions such as Latin America. That history is worth reclaiming.
A coalition in defence of human rights
What is needed is a UN coalition in defence of a human rights multilateralism that is democratic, inclusive, centred on the needs of victims and of states, and that safeguards the independence and effectiveness of its human rights bodies.
Such a coalition could rebuild the global levers that allow for human rights progress: upholding human rights as our moral compass, preserving international law as our social contract and restoring political will to tackle all crises without distinction. Where no country, small or medium, can speak up alone, strength in numbers reduces the political cost of taking a stand solidly aligned with human rights.
It should urgently strengthen the HRC, secure stable funding for UN rights bodies and commit to consistent responses to all crises based on objective criteria, not politics.
There are already encouraging signs. Last week, Albania, the Netherlands, Chile, Kyrgyzstan and Kenya rallied 90 countries – half of which from the global south – at the Human Rights Council in a joint pledge to renew political efforts to defend human rights multilateralism. In New York, small island states like Mauritius, the Maldives and Cabo Verde are siding with Latin American countries in their long-standing effort to oppose China and Russia’s attempts to defund human rights work in budget negotiations.
What will this take? Political courage – to confront violations wherever they occur, from Gaza to El-Fasher to Xinjiang to Minnesota, and at home. Vision and ambition – not performative diplomacy, but a human rights foreign policy with more teeth, resources and influence, that transcends electoral cycles. Working hand in hand with civil society on solutions that are centred on the demands of victims and activists on the frontlines. And money – funding the UN’s human rights work and the NGOs and activists that enable it is not charity. It is a long-term investment in a safer, more just and orderly world.
At the UN, power in numbers still matters. The question is whether states are willing to use it.
This article was originally published by Geneva Solutions and is republished here under the same CC BY 4.0 license.
