Civil society secured a major victory at the 60th session of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council, but it came as the foundations of the global human rights system are being eroded. Against a backdrop of devastating budget cuts and states walking away from multilateral accountability, the session established an independent investigative mechanism for Afghanistan, a landmark achievement that followed years of civil society advocacy. But critical gaps remain, with the Council staying silent on severe human rights violations in China, Egypt and Yemen, while uncompetitive elections allowed states that systematically violate human rights to secure Council seats, positioning themselves to shield each other from scrutiny.

Behind the scenes, UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s UN80 Initiative, an efficiency drive framed around the UN’s 80th anniversary and launched in March, promises major reforms. But unless the severe shortfall in human rights funding – a direct result of states’ choices – is addressed, respect for international human rights law and institutions will likely worsen.

Civil society efforts rewarded

The session’s biggest success was the Afghanistan resolution. The new independent investigative mechanism will collect and preserve evidence of human rights abuses, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. It has a broad mandate to examine violations committed by the Taliban, former government officials, warlords, international forces and non-state armed groups. Its work will focus particularly on documenting systematic abuses against women and girls, which experts describe as gender persecution. Crucially, the mechanism will prepare case files to support future prosecutions in national and international courts, working closely with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The resolution was shaped by years of calls from Afghan and international civil society organisations (CSOs). HRD+, a network of Afghan human rights defenders supported by over 100 CSOs, renewed its call for an investigative body in August. Following this hard-won victory, the challenge now lies in making the mechanism operational quickly despite the UN’s serious financial constraints.

The Council also renewed several critical country mandates: Special Rapporteurs on Burundi, Cambodia and Russia, the Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR) mandate on Sri Lanka.

The renewal of the Burundi Special Rapporteur, following civil society advocacy, allows continued scrutiny as the country prepares for a presidential election in 2027. Ten years after protests against then President Pierre Nkurunziza’s third-term bid sparked violent repression, killings and mass displacement, monitoring remains essential to prevent history repeating itself as current President Évariste Ndayishimiye seeks a second term. Civil society issued a joint letter in August stressing the mandate’s importance given ongoing violations and abuses.

The Cambodia mandate, renewed for two years, provides an essential lifeline for civil society and human rights defenders facing deepening repression under an autocratic regime. But the resolution’s focus on technical assistance failed to capture the severity of the state’s criminalisation of human rights defenders, environmental and land rights activists, political opponents and independent media.

Renewal of the Special Rapporteur on Russia ensures continued documentation of the country’s desperate human rights situation. The Special Rapporteur has corroborated systematic torture of prisoners of war and political detainees, closure of independent CSOs and prosecution of human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers for speaking out against the Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The Sudan Fact-Finding Mission’s renewal aligns with a call made by over 100 CSOs. Alarmingly, 11 states, including China, Cuba, Ethiopia and Sudan itself, opposed the resolution. With Sudan’s civil war causing one of the world’s gravest humanitarian and human rights crises, less than full support sends a troubling signal about which crises are deemed to matter.

A two-year extension means the mandate for the OHCHR in Sri Lanka will keep monitoring human rights, gathering evidence and reporting on accountability and reconciliation, including for past crimes committed during the country’s earlier armed conflict. But the resolution relies too heavily on government commitments, which it’s repeatedly broken in the past.

States also voted to renew key thematic mandates for the next three years, including the Special Rapporteur on the right to development, a role that responds to the fact that over 800 million people still live in extreme poverty and progress on bringing people out of extreme poverty has now flatlined. The mandates of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples were also extended.

The Council adopted several new thematic resolutions, including on the death penalty, the human rights of women and children in conflict and post-conflict situations, racism and reprisals against human rights defenders and UN mandate holders. The reprisals resolution acknowledges the growing trend of transnational repression and attacks against experts in response to their mandates.

The Council also addressed the climate crisis, adopting a resolution on the human rights impacts of sea-level rise, building on a recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion that clarified that states have a legal obligation to prevent climate harm. Civil society however was disappointed the resolution failed to mention fossil fuels, keeping up a dismal history that has seen petrostates and oil and gas corporations use their lobbying power to prevent official acknowledgement of the need to stop fossil fuel use.

Funding problems

But at the same as this flurry of resolutions has provided further scope for human rights accountability, severe funding constraints are undermining it. Human rights is supposedly one of the UN’s three pillars, alongside development and peace, but it’s always received only a fraction of the funding of the other two, with only around five per cent of the UN’s regular budget. Now the UN estimates its 2026 budget will slash human rights resources by 15 per cent and cut jobs by 18 per cent compared with 2025.

This has already resulted in the UN shortening Council sessions, which reduces opportunities for civil society participation, and merging mandates, which increases their workload and reduces their capacity to respond to violations. The mandates of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery and Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons have been merged, despite being distinct areas requiring dedicated attention.

The mandate of the Independent Expert on Somalia, one of the longest-standing ones, has been terminated, replaced with technical assistance and monitoring by the OHCHR and leaving Somalia without dedicated independent scrutiny. The mandate of the International Team of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has also been terminated, with states deciding to continue technical assistance and capacity development. While a February 2025 special session created a Fact-Finding Mission to be followed by a Commission of Inquiry on the DRC, the commission isn’t yet operational due to lack of funding. This forced the DRC to pursue a resolution to force the commission’s establishment.

With new commitments made and existing ones renewed at the latest session, the funding crisis will likely further result in resolutions not being implemented. If the situation persists, the Council will become less able to respond quickly as urgent situations of grave human rights violations develop.

The contrast between needs and resources has never been starker. A long-term underfunding problem has become a crisis because states are shifting away from multilateral engagement and refusing to pay their dues.

Silence on critical issues

Another challenge caused by the Council’s state-centric nature was evident at the latest session: powerful authoritarian states leveraged their international alliances to keep their human rights violations off the agenda, and democratic states that claim to respect human rights made selective judgements on the basis of self-interested calculations about which countries to hold to account.

The Council’s continued silence on Egypt was particularly shocking given recent evidence of serious international crimes. A new report documents the existence of a mass grave in North Sinai containing over 300 bodies and presents further evidence of large-scale extrajudicial killings of civilians by Egyptian security forces during operations against ISIS-affiliated militants between 2013 and 2022. These violations amount to potential crimes against humanity and war crimes. In a letter to UN member states and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Egyptian CSOs called for the immediate establishment of a UN investigation into these abuses. But Egypt is a strategic partner of several Middle East and western states, and the Council failed to act.

The Council also stayed silent on Yemen, despite increasing calls from civil society for action on arbitrary arrests of journalists and human rights defenders. Yemen has had no independent international mechanism to monitor ongoing human rights violations and establish accountability since the termination of the mandate of the Group of Eminent Experts on Yemen in October 2021, following an intensive lobbying campaign by Saudi Arabia, which has played a lead role in Yemen’s conflict and stands accused of serious violations. Using what observers described as incentives and threats, Saudi Arabia persuaded 21 states to vote against renewing the mandate.

The Council’s silence about one of the world’s most powerful states, China, continued too, despite the OHCHR having found in 2022 that the Chinese state is committing serious human rights violations against its Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang region. Civil society renewed calls for a monitoring mechanism, as UN human rights experts have repeatedly requested, but once again demands went unheard.

Meanwhile another strategic western ally, Ethiopia, is cracking down on civil society and independent media as the government seeks to prevent scrutiny ahead of a general election next year. But the Council ended its investigative mechanism on Ethiopia in 2023 following extensive Ethiopian lobbying and hasn’t revisited the decision except for a joint statement endorsed by 42 states.

Authoritarian political shifts are also bringing unprecedented challenges for the Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process, through which states are held accountable for their human rights records, with civil society able to provide inputs. Nicaragua has simply stopped cooperating with UPR processes, seeking to curtail international oversight as the country becomes steadily more autocratic.

The USA has also announced it won’t participate in its planned UPR, further making clear the Trump administration’s complete disregard for the international human rights system. This is part of an approach that has seen the USA sanction ICC judges and the Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The danger is that other repressive states could follow suit.

Uncompetitive elections

Another long-running problem recurred when it came to choosing new Council members. Its 47 members serve three-year terms, with around a third rotating off each year, although states can seek a second term, as Chile, South Africa and Vietnam 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 for new members to serve from 2026 to 2028 were held on 14 October. But this was an election without competition. All five regional groups fielded exactly as many candidates as available seats, turning an opportunity for states to compete on the basis of their human rights records into a pure formality. The result is that states responsible for numerous human rights violations will join the Council.

Egypt, Iraq and Vietnam all have closed civic space, indicating the complete denial of fundamental freedoms to mobilise, protest and speak out. While most of the new members published voluntary pledges outlining their plans, indicating a willingness to engage with civil society, scorecards produced by International Service for Human Rights show that six of the 14 states chosen for the Council failed to meet most of the criteria that should guide membership, including cooperation with UN mechanisms, protection of civic space and implementation of Council recommendations.

The non-competitive election means states that impose serious civic space restrictions retain their Council majority. They can be expected to keep protecting each other and rejecting scrutiny in the name of sovereignty, curbing the ability of the Council to act on human rights crises.

Implementation needed

The human rights system has the tools it needs – special mandate holders, investigative mechanisms, the UPR process and treaty bodies – but lacks the political will needed to use them effectively and the resources to sustain them.

The Afghanistan mechanism proves civil society advocacy can still bring progress in challenging circumstances. But successes like this come against a backdrop of systemic retreat: many states are refusing to fund the system they created, some are entirely repudiating accountability mechanisms and others are securing Council seats despite abysmal human rights records.

If change is to come, it will need meaningful opportunities for civil society participation during the current round of reforms, adequate resources to ensure the capacity and independence of human rights mechanisms and consistent application of human rights standards regardless of which states are involved. Without these, the danger is that the world’s human rights crises will multiply and deepen.

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