The global human rights community can breathe a small sigh of relief. Russia’s bid to rejoin the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, the world’s pre-eminent human rights body, has failed.

At the vote to appoint new members on 10 October, Russia came a distant third in the race to choose two Council members from Central and Eastern Europe. With every UN member state having the right to vote, competitors Bulgaria, with 160 votes, and Albania, with 123, finished far ahead of Russia, on 83 votes. The result means there’s no quick return for Russia to the Human Rights Council, which it was suspended from in April 2022 in response to its war on Ukraine.

It would have made a mockery of the Council if Russia had been allowed to rejoin. Vladimir Putin is currently subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant on war crimes charges for the abduction and transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia. His country is the subject of heightened UN scrutiny, with the Council voting last year to create an Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine and a special rapporteur on human rights in Russia. The Commission’s latest report found continuing evidence that Russian forces are committing war crimes, including the widespread and systematic use of torture and sexual violence.

Under the resolution that established the Human Rights Council in 2006, states when voting are supposed to ‘take into account the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights’. Once elected, Council members are required to ‘uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights’ and to ‘fully cooperate with the Council’. It’s impossible to see how Russia could comply with this.

The vote means the Russian government has been denied a key platform to promote its self-serving perspective that human rights can be redefined by national leaders. Had its bid succeeded, it would have been able to further its claims that criticism of its human rights record comes only from western states pushing a political agenda. But the fact is that a majority of the members of the UN General Assembly, the world’s peak body – most of which come from the global south – have rejected it.

Rights abusers to the fore

But it’s far from all good news. Taking their place on the Council next January are some states that have committed appalling atrocity crimes and repress the fundamental civil society rights to organise, protest and speak out. Nine of the 15 new members impose serious restrictions on civic space.

China leads the pack. It systematically silences dissent, including through widespread detentions, censorship and pervasive surveillance. It has waged a long campaign of repression against campaigners for democracy in Hong Kong and committed gross human rights crimes against the Muslim population in its Xinjiang region.

Cuba is the other state with closed civic space re-elected to the Council. It’s also a totalitarian state with pervasive social control where dissidents are routinely jailed and protests are harshly repressed.

In Burundi, a climate of fear fuels self-censorship, laws severely restrict the ability of civil society organisations to operate and there’s been little accountability for the ruling party’s past large-scale human rights violations. Kuwait’s record is no better: online activists are criminalised and the stateless Bedoon community and those who defend their rights are persecuted. Indonesia, meanwhile, is seeing a deterioration in its civic space, with defamation laws criminalising dissent, brutal police force being used against protesters and activists for independence in the Papua region frequently subjected to harassment, intimidation and prosecution.

The result of the latest round of voting is a Council where the balance has slightly shifted in favour of states with more open civic space – but states that impose serious civic space restrictions retain their majority. Thanks to the re-election of China and Cuba, the repressive alliance of states that protect each other and reject scrutiny in the name of sovereignty is likely to remain as strong as ever.

Uncompetitive elections

One reason for this is that most states take their seats on the Council unopposed. The Council has 47 members that serve three-year terms, with around a third rotating off every year, although states can stand for a second term, as China, Cuba, France and Malawi did this time. Seats are allocated to each of the UN’s five regional blocs: Africa, Asia and Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Western Europe and other states.

Elections are rarely competitive. This time there were only two regions where the outcome was at stake, with the Africa, Asia and Western Europe and other states regions putting forward closed slates, nominating only as many candidates as seats available. In Central and Eastern Europe, competition was crucial to stop Russia taking a seat. But in contrast, in Latin America and the Caribbean, a competitive vote produced a disappointing outcome: Cuba topped the poll on 146 votes, with Peru losing out.

Cuba apart, the vote tallies to some extent reflect an attempt by civil society and more democratic states to make human rights matter in voting decisions. The concerted campaign to at least reduce the level of support for China may have had some impact: China got fewer votes than the other three Asian states in its closed race, while Burundi likewise came last in the African group, with some states exercising the only choice available – to abstain rather than endorse. Russia was a distant third in its election, although it’s still a matter of concern that 83 states threw their weight behind it and as many as 164 backed China.

Civil society continues to call for genuinely competitive elections in each regional bloc, and for the stronger scrutiny and discussion of candidate states’ human rights records this would allow. While Cuba’s membership shows competition is no magic bullet, it at least broadens the scope for civil society advocacy.

Human rights abuses persist

An argument might be made that bringing states with regressive human rights practices into the Council exposes them to heightened scrutiny of their domestic human rights records and forces them to meet higher standards. But if that was ever the case, it’s questionable now.

Vietnam joined the Council at the last round of elections a year ago, but its dismal human rights record has further deteriorated since, with a recent spate of jailings of environmental activists. The same could be said of India, which joined the year before but continues to attack human rights with impunity, as shown this month in an assault on media freedoms, with coordinated raids on 40 locations of people associated with the NewsClick media outlet, and senior staff detained. And since Sudan joined the Council, conflict has broken out between military factions that has seen multiple atrocities, cost thousands of lives and forced millions of people to flee.

And then there’s China. At the UN General Assembly opening last month, China’s representative spoke of the need to advance human rights through dialogue and cooperation – very much the words you might hope to hear from a state retaining its place on the Human Rights Council.

But those words were empty. Last year, the UN published its report investigating China’s systematic human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The report found credible evidence of torture, sexual and gender-based violence, forced birth control, arbitrary and discriminatory detention and discrimination on religious and ethnic grounds. It concluded that these may constitute crimes under international law. The Chinese government’s response was to do everything it could to try to stop the report being published. And when it only succeeded in delaying publication, it used every lever available to persuade states to prevent the report being discussed. Last October, the Council narrowly voted against a resolution to hold a debate on the report. China was able to use its role on the Council to prevent rather than promote human rights debate and scrutiny. There’s no indication things will be different this time round.

A mixed record

When it came to the substance of the Human Rights Council’s discussions in its latest session, the results were mixed. There was a welcome renewal of mandates of some key special rapporteurs – independent experts who monitor and advise on specific human rights situations – including on Afghanistan, Cambodia and Russia.

The Afghanistan resolution echoed several of civil society’s calls, including for the reinstatement of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and the national human rights institution, abolished by the Taliban, and the provision of an enabling environment for civil society. There was a strong resolution on Burundi, broadly reflecting civil society’s demands and renewing the special rapporteur’s mandate. The Council also voted to establish a fact-finding commission to investigate human rights violations being committed in Sudan’s conflict.

But in many cases, the resolutions were less strong than civil society had called for. Worse, nothing was said on China this time, meaning the Council did even less than the year before, when there was at least a vote. Once again the Council failed to respond adequately to the human rights situation in the context of Yemen’s conflict. And disappointingly, the mandate of the International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia, established two years ago in response to conflict in the Tigray region, lapsed, without a vote being taken on whether to renew it. This came despite its latest report finding that there have been ‘grave and systematic’ human rights violations, with ongoing abuses despite the peace deal struck last November.

The Ethiopian government, which earlier in the year successfully lobbied for a similar initiative from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to be wound up, has got its way, closing down international scrutiny of the many human rights violations being committed as conflict continues to flare.

Despite these setbacks, civil society will keep taking every opportunity available to engage with and try to influence the Human Rights Council. It will continue to use its mechanisms to defend and promote human rights, advocate for states to do better, expose their rights violations and hold them to account. States need to recognise civil society’s fundamental role in achieving the aims of the Council and making it more effective. Opening up the election process to have more competition and greater civil society scrutiny would be one helpful step forward.