Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli

Here’s your job: Investigate violations of the rights to food, shelter, or freedom of expression for every single person on Earth.

You won’t be paid, so you’re supposed to manage this all as a side gig. How do you decide which few situations get your attention, while everything else does not?

This is what the United Nations’ “special rapporteurs” do. They are a group of around 60 outside experts, mostly from academia, given mandates to investigate specific human rights or situations.

The UN gives them logistical support, and pays for their country visits and travel. In return, they get prestige for themselves and the university that employs them, and they can use their UN appointment to bolster their credibility with the media and the public. Beyond that, they’re on their own.

An organization called UN Watch recently released a report documenting how the rapporteurs narrow down their impossibly broad duties. In many cases, it turns out to be by concentrating on criticism of Israel and the West, while giving comparatively little attention to other abuses.

For example, between Oct. 7, 2023 and March 18, 2026, the human rights rapporteurs issued a whopping 106 joint statements on Israel.

For comparison, they issued just 29 statements on Russia, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the war with Ukraine. There were a mere 16 joint statements on Sudan, where hundreds of thousands of people have died, and millions face famine.

The report profiles 13 rapporteurs, showing how mandates as diverse as health, food, and economic sanctions often produce remarkably similar anti-Israel rhetoric and hostility toward Western democracies.

One example is Tlaleng Mofokeng, tasked with investigating the right to health. She reacted to the Oct. 7 massacre by saying, “you cannot extinguish the human desire for freedom,” without a word about innocent Israelis murdered and taken hostage.

According to the report, she also refused to condemn Hamas, and employs inflammatory rhetoric when criticizing US and other Western leaders, while praising Cuban leaders. She says nothing about Cuba’s shortcomings when it comes to health, and while she often criticizes Israel, she overlooks the health system deficiencies of most other countries.

Beyond criticizing individual rapporteurs, UN Watch goes a step further and asks a fundamental question: why does the United Nations Human Rights Council, meant to advocate for the betterment of all humanity, consistently platform anti-Israel and anti-Western propaganda?

The UN Watch report gives a number of answers. Most important, it points to the rapporteur application process. This is often dominated by authoritarian governments, which use it to push candidates to their ideological liking. The report urges democratic countries to establish their own selection process, even outside the formal UN framework if need be.

UN Watch also points out how special rapporteurs are currently allowed to accept funds from individuals, corporations, and governments to support their work. This allows interested parties to attempt to influence the rapporteurs’ investigations and agendas. Rapporteurs are also allowed to accept contributions and gifts to cover expenses, with no disclosure required.

The rapporteur on economic sanctions received more than $1.3 million from Russia, China, and Qatar — countries that, along with their allies, are frequently the subject of sanctions. The rapporteur on the rights of women and girls received funding from numerous countries, including Saudi Arabia, which has some of the world’s most discriminatory restrictions on women. Many received donations from foundations with known anti-Israel agendas. And pro-Hamas groups paid for expenses of the rapporteur who covers Israel and the Palestinian territories, during a trip to Australia.

Meanwhile, earmarked donations also cause significant inequality between the mandates. In one striking example, from 2015 to 2023, the working group on human rights and transnational corporations received approximately $4 million in earmarked funds. The rapporteur for internally displaced persons received none, showing how funding tends to flow to mandates that affect powerful stakeholders rather than those serving people with limited political and economic influence.

An original suggestion from UN Watch is that mandate holders be prohibited from posting on social media. The rationale is that the job of special rapporteurs is supposed to be to conduct careful research and then report it in a measured, impartial manner. Quick, provocative reactions to current events — which are rewarded by social media algorithms — are exactly the opposite of what the rapporteurs should produce.

UN Watch documents how one rapporteur called Guantanamo Bay a Nazi concentration camp, another called for sending Donald Trump to the moon, while a third said the US is a “gangster state.”

A ban on social media would discourage countries from using rapporteur appointments as a means of conferring UN legitimacy on sympathetic online commentators, and help reinforce the distinction between independent investigation and social media activism.

In a world as diverse and troubled as ours, human rights enforcement will always require prioritization. All the more so when this enormous task is entrusted to such a small and poorly funded group. Yet for the human rights system to gain legitimacy, that prioritization must be guided by objective criteria, not bias or politics.

Shlomo Levin is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah, and he uses fiction to explore human rights at https://shalzed.com/.