The UN Human Rights Council

The UN Human Rights Council is the United Nations’ principal human rights body, created in 2006 to replace a discredited predecessor, and it has spent its existence reproducing the flaw it was built to fix: since 2006 it has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than every other country on the planet combined, while routinely seating governments accused of torture, mass detention, and war crimes as members sitting in judgment of others. It also does real, unglamorous work: torture investigations, disappearance tracking, and a universal review of every UN member state’s human rights record. Both things are true, and an honest article states both.

What it is and who built it

The Council was established by UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251, adopted 15 March 2006, “in replacement of the Commission on Human Rights,” the body it succeeded after the Commission’s own membership, which had included Libya and Sudan, made it a global punchline. The resolution created a 47-member body, seats allocated by region (13 African, 13 Asian, 6 Eastern European, 8 Latin American and Caribbean, 7 Western European and other), with members elected by the General Assembly for staggered three-year terms. It meets in Geneva, holds at least three regular sessions a year totaling ten weeks, and can convene special sessions on request. The same resolution gives the General Assembly power to suspend a member “that commits gross and systematic violations of human rights” by a two-thirds vote, a power used exactly twice: against Libya in 2011 during Muammar Gaddafi’s crackdown on protesters, and against Russia on 7 April 2022 (93 in favor, 24 against, 58 abstaining) over the invasion of Ukraine.

Real work on torture and disappearances, and the item reserved for one country

The Council runs the Universal Periodic Review, a rolling examination of every UN member state’s human rights record on a several-year cycle, a genuinely unique mechanism no other body attempts at that scale. It appoints special rapporteurs on torture, enforced disappearance, freedom of expression, and other themes who produce real fact-finding on real abuses in Syria, Myanmar, North Korea, and elsewhere. Its parent office, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), ran on a 2026 UN regular budget of $224.3 million (a 10 percent cut from 2025) supplemented by a $400 million voluntary-contribution appeal that High Commissioner Volker Turk said was needed because the office was operating in “survival mode.” None of that work is fiction. It coexists with the record below.

The record on Israel

Since the Council’s creation, Israel has been condemned in at least four annual resolutions every single session (five until 2020, when two were merged), while regimes such as Iran and North Korea draw one resolution each. Israel is the subject of nine special sessions convened by the Council since 2006, more than any other country, and nine commissions of inquiry, again more than any other state, compared to one each for North Korea and Iran and two each for Libya, Myanmar, and Syria. In the Council’s first nine years alone it passed more resolutions condemning Israel than it passed against the entire rest of the world combined. No other UN member state has a permanent standing item on the Council’s agenda; Agenda Item 7 exists for one country, Israel, at every session, a structural feature the Council’s own architects never applied to any other conflict on earth, including Syria’s civil war or China’s Xinjiang camps.

The Council’s own appointees have supplied some of the sharpest evidence of the bias. Special rapporteur Richard Falk posted an antisemitic cartoon invoking blood libel and 9/11 conspiracy imagery on his blog in 2011 and was later disowned by the UN Secretary-General over a 2017 report accusing Israel of apartheid. His successor Francesca Albanese has downplayed and denied documented sexual violence from the October 7 attacks in her own public statements. And in July 2022, Miloon Kothari, a member of the Council’s standing Commission of Inquiry on Israel chaired by Navi Pillay, told an interviewer that social media was “controlled largely by…the Jewish lobby,” a remark formally condemned by 17 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France; the Council quietly declined to reappoint him to a new UN role in March 2026 after a sustained public campaign.

Membership: who sits in judgment

Because Council seats are allocated by regional bloc rather than by human rights record, governments credibly accused of the abuses the Council exists to police routinely win election to it, including states that have themselves faced UN scrutiny for repression, use of the death penalty without due process, or the jailing of dissidents. The 2006 resolution asks electing states to weigh “the contribution of candidates to the promotion and protection of human rights,” a standard with no enforcement mechanism, which is why suspension has only ever been used twice in the Council’s history despite a membership roster that has regularly included some of the world’s most repressive governments.

The United States, twice out

The United States withdrew from the Council in June 2018 under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Nikki Haley, who called it “a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias” citing its “disproportionate focus and unending hostility toward Israel.” Washington rejoined under the Biden administration in 2021. On 4 February 2025 (signed 3 February), a new executive order withdrew the United States again, directing the Secretary of State to terminate the US representative post to the Council and explicitly citing the 2018 withdrawal as precedent, on the grounds that the body “protected human rights abusers by allowing them to use the organization to shield themselves from scrutiny.”

Why the bias matters

A body built to police the world’s worst abuses instead spends a disproportionate share of its attention, agenda time, and investigative machinery on the world’s only Jewish state, a pattern that predates the Council and traces back to the “Zionism is racism” era of UN politics. The effect is not abstract: a standing agenda item, annual condemnations regardless of events on the ground, and investigators who have themselves used antisemitic language all launder political hostility toward Israel into the vocabulary of neutral, technical human rights findings, findings then cited by activists, courts, and other UN bodies as though they were produced by an impartial referee rather than a body voting from a fixed script.

Francesca Albanese · The IHRA Definition · Agenda Item 7 · NGO Monitor · Working Definition of Antisemitism · Weaponization of Antisemitism