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Systemic corruption exposed at the United Nations (The inmates are running the asylum). The case for nonviolent struggle and sanctions.
If you want to understand the crisis at the United Nations then one should examine more closely the “Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights”, and place it in the larger international context. According to UN Watch, the Geneva based watchdog organization that seeks to hold the United Nations accountable to its founding principles, “the original sponsor of this Orwellian UN mandate—creating the post of a UN Rapporteur on why sanctions on dictatorships are illegal “unilateral coercive measures”—was the Islamic Regime in Iran, on behalf of the NAM. Resolution 27/21 of September 2014.”
Earlier today on X, UN Watch’s executive director Hillel Neuer reported“No Joke: The UN next week will hold its first “International Day against Unilateral Coercive Measures” — declaring all Western sanctions against Iran, Russia, North Korea and other tyrannies as a violation of international law. Those who initiated this include China, Cuba and Iran.” He provided a copy of the official document below.
The inmates are running the asylum, and U.S. taxpayers are picking up 25% of the total tab.
Consider the following.
The Special Rapporteur that defends dictatorships
Special Rapporteur Ms. Alena Douhan, an academic from Belarus, described by human rights defenders as “a Maduro propagandist” visited Cuba from November 11 – 21, 2025, and repeated Cuban government talking points.
Ms. Douhan failed to mention that Cuba’s kleptocratic military junta, with billions of dollars in cash reserves, pleads poverty while Cubans living in extreme poverty die due to a lack of lifesaving medications. Meanwhile, regime elites live the good life, visiting Europe and the United States. Nor did she mention that official document leaks indicate that through its military conglomerate GAESA, Havana’s military has $18 billion in bank accounts, more than the foreign reserves of Costa Rica, Uruguay and Panama.
This is not surprising she has also done this in previous visits to Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and China where she embraced those regimes. In the case of China she claimed that the Peoples Republic of China is a victim of “illegal” Western sanctions, and Ms. Douhan remained silent on the genocide of the Uyghurs.
The Special Rapporteur received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Peoples Republic of China then proceeded to repeat Beijing’s false narrative drawing the condemnation of Uyghur American Activist Rushan Abbas in 2024.
The United Nations Human Rights Council is supposed to be “responsible for strengthening the promotion and protection of human rights around the globe, and for addressing and taking action on human rights violations around the globe,” but in practice the Council on too many occasions has turned into a body to protect rights violators. On March 18, 2021 a CubaBrief explored the problematic origins of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, but a 2021 outrage by this human rights body requires additional comment.
On March 23, 2021 the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolutionwith 30 votes in favor, 15 votes against and 2 abstentions that calls on countries to not “use or encourage the use of any type of measure, including but not limited to economic or political measures, to coerce another State in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights.” The 15 countries that voted against it were Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Marshall Islands, Netherlands, Poland, Republic of Korea, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The countries that voted for it included Russia, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Mauritania, Venezuela Sudan, Pakistan, and Libya. It is a who’s who of the worse human rights violators in the world.
Andres Oppenheimer, writing in the Miami Herald reported that “hours after the Council’s resolution, Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez applauded the vote, and Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tweeted that for ‘basic ethical reasons, the countries that voted against (the resolution) should lose their seats at the Council.’”
Oppenheimer was wrong when he said in 2021 to not pay attention to the resolution that the dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba were calling a victory, because this is an alternative international system that is being brought into existence out of the old one established in 1948, and hostile to the values and principles found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Ignore this at your peril.
This resolution and the mandate behind it (the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of the unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights), backed by Cuba’s dictatorship, has consequences that empowers dictators and bad actors the world over. The Special Rapporteur from (2015-19), former Algerian ambassador Idriss Jazairy presented a report in 2017 slamming the United States and the European Union “for imposing sanctions on Russia”, which the U.N. human rights council investigator said amounted to “unilateral coercive measures.” This was compounded by the corruption exposed by UN Watch that Ambassador Idriss Jazairy, had received $50,000 from Russia in 2016 “for his mandate, as disclosed in a recent UN report.”
Sanctions are a nonviolent tool to defend human rights, and hold dictatorships accountable
Dictatorships and bad actors on the international stage are working to strip civil society and democracies of the tools to nonviolently defeat them. They fear and despise the legacy of Gene Sharp (1928 – 2018) founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, and a theoretician of nonviolent action who in 1990 at the National Conference on Nonviolent Sanctions and Defense in Boston, made the case for nonviolent struggle:
“I say nonviolent struggle is armed struggle. And we have to take back that term from those advocates of violence who seek to justify with pretty words that kind of combat. Only with this type of struggle one fights with psychological weapons, social weapons, economic weapons and political weapons. And that this is ultimately more powerful against oppression, injustice and tyranny than violence.”
According to Professor Sharp in his 2013 book HOW NONVIOLENT STRUGGLE WORKS (available online) , third parties on the international scene, including countries, can play a supplementary and complementary role but are never leading the struggle.
“Third-party actions may include protests, public declarations, demonstrations, diplomatic actions, economic sanctions, and the like. They ought to be seen as supplementary and complementary, but never as the main actions of the struggle. The proportion of successes among past cases of international nonviolent action, especially by third parties, is extremely small. The actions have been generally symbolic, and more substantial types, as economic sanctions, have not been applied on the systematic and sustained basis required for effectiveness. International action is not a substitute for internal action by the grievance group itself.”
Nonviolent movements can obtain a measure of protection with international solidarity, provided through reporting on their plight, and a range of tools that include economic and political sanctions by both civil society and other nation states. Human rights abusers, and outlaw regimes that murder their own people view these instruments with concern, and have managed through coordination with each other to reshape international institutions to undermine human rights. Lamentably, Ms. Alena Douhan is assisting these repressive regimes while undermining the legitimacy of nonviolent tactics to challenge them on the international level.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025
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