UN Human Rights Council at 20: Reformed structure, recurring political gridlock

Twenty years ago, the United Nations tried to fix something broken. The Human Rights Commission, which had existed since 1946, had become a place where nothing got done. Sessions stretched past midnight. Countries formed blocs and vetoed each other's proposals. Decisions required consensus, which meant anyone could kill anything. A single day per year was set aside for victims and civil society groups to speak, and even then, few diplomats bothered to stay in the room. The whole apparatus had become so paralyzed by regional politics and competing ideologies that it had lost credibility. So in 2006, the world created the Human Rights Council to replace it.

Luis Alfonso de Alba Góngora, Mexico's ambassador to Geneva at the time, was appointed the council's first president and tasked with building something that actually worked. He walked into a room with no rulebook. "There were no rules," he recalls now, sitting in the Mexican mission where he once orchestrated the council's founding architecture. He made moves that sound almost reckless in retrospect. He removed regional groups from the council's leadership structure. He invited civil society to every session, not just one day a year. He extended all the special rapporteur mandates for a year, buying time to negotiate a real framework—a request he won by threatening to resign and demanding a vote of confidence. When the final institutional package came together, with just hours left in his mandate, he didn't have full agreement from China, Canada, or Colombia. So he called a meeting at six in the evening, told the room he was done, and said it was up to the next president. The delegates, alarmed at the prospect of the council dying after a single year, agreed to extend the session until midnight. De Alba never asked for formal approval. He simply gavelled the package through. The room erupted in applause.

Two decades later, the council sits at its most difficult moment. It has 47 member states and a reputation as the world's foremost authority on human rights. But it is also squeezed by budget crises, political gridlock, and accusations that it does exactly what it was created to prevent: play favorites, apply double standards, and allow autocratic states with documented abuses to hold seats at the table. Hassan Shire, executive director of the Uganda-based NGO Defend Defenders and a human rights campaigner who witnessed the council's birth, recalls pitching the council's work to US Republican lawmakers. When they saw scrutiny applied to Israel but not to Cuba or Belarus, they dismissed it as worthless. "It's like ordering one flavor of pizza for 47 people," Shire says of the impossible task of pleasing all members.

The bloc politics that the council was designed to dissolve have simply re-emerged in new forms. Regional groups coordinate positions. Political alliances provide cover for each other. Conservative countries have begun taking antagonistic stances on issues like gender rights. The African group, Shire notes, often shields members from scrutiny despite evidence of violations. De Alba sees the familiar climate returning. "They've gone back to entrenching themselves into groups and very antagonistic positions, where one side can't even bear to see the word 'gender'," he says. The crises that tested the council in 2006—Israel's operations in Lebanon and Gaza, atrocities in Darfur—echo in current conflicts where the council's response is still deemed insufficient.

The Universal Periodic Review, a peer-to-peer assessment meant to ensure every country stands on equal footing regardless of size or power, was supposed to be the council's answer to accusations of selectivity. It was hailed as a cornerstone mechanism. Now it faces unprecedented resistance. Last year, the United States and Nicaragua both skipped their reviews—a first. De Alba worries others will follow. "If you strip the review of its universal character, it loses the argument that it's a truly fair, even-handed, non-selective exercise," he says. The mechanism only works if participation carries a political cost for those who refuse.

Yet de Alba remains cautiously optimistic about the council's future, though his optimism rests on a fragile foundation: strong presidential leadership. "If you don't have that leadership, you don't pull the cart forward—you just get stuck," he says. The council's procedures and tools are far more flexible than what came before. Civil society has real access. The machinery of decision-making no longer requires consensus on everything. But the underlying logic—the bloc politics, the double standards, the bureaucratic weight—persists. The council is a paradox: more inclusive and nimble than its predecessor, yet operating within the same structural constraints that plagued it from the start. At its most recent review last month, countries agreed the council should continue for another five years. Whether it will still be standing in 20 more, paradoxes and all, remains an open question.