Author: Peyton Brookes and Merce Monje Cano

How ordinary UN procedure keeps unrepresented peoples out of the room, what has pushed back, and what reform alone cannot reach

1. A pattern UNPO named, that has since sharpened

In 2019, UNPO published Compromised Space: Bullying and Blocking at the UN Human Rights Mechanisms, documenting how member states use the ordinary procedures of the United Nations, not their absence, to keep unrepresented peoples out of the rooms where their rights are discussed. Six years on, the pattern that report named has not receded. It has been refined and resourced, above all by China, which has become the most systematic practitioner of it, though by no means the only one.

None of this is abstract for UNPO. The organisation has itself been denied ECOSOC consultative status, which is a large part of why UNPO’s own members find it increasingly difficult to access the UN human rights system directly. What follows is written from inside that experience, not about it from outside.

2. How exclusion actually works

Accreditation is the first chokepoint. The UN Committee on NGOs can defer any application for consultative status indefinitely, one procedural question at a time, without ever holding a vote to reject it outright. A 2025 tracking report found that China accounted for roughly 18 percent of all questions posed to NGO applicants across 2020-2024, rising to 28 percent in 2024 alone, and that at least fifteen applications had been held in deferral for eight years or longer (1). No vote against these organisations was ever needed. The mechanism does not have to win an argument. It only has to keep asking.

The floor itself is the second chokepoint, once someone is in the room. The Ninth session of the UN Forum on Minority Issues in 2016 saw an unprecedented number of procedural interruptions of minority delegates, timed specifically to derail their interventions, deliberately disruptive acts intended to discredit the speaker and shorten the space available to them. A newer variant is volume rather than interruption: government-organised NGOs now occupy a growing share of the limited speaking time at the Human Rights Council, with Chinese-affiliated statements growing roughly sixteen-fold between 2018 and 2024, to the point that close to one in twenty-five NGO statements delivered at the Council came from such an organisation (2). Nobody needs to silence an independent witness if enough of the remaining floor time is filled with someone paid to say something else. Exclusion can also begin before a representative ever reaches the floor. Attempts have separately been documented to blacklist accredited individuals from future sessions and to deny already-credentialed representatives access to premises they had a right to enter, as is most prominently documented through Dolkun Isa’s ejection from UN premises and the 2013 detention of Cao Shunli

A third and quieter chokepoint is money. The human rights pillar has received an average of only around five percent of the UN’s regular budget since 2021. Since 2025, US non-payment and withdrawal from the Human Rights Council has widened the space for other states to shape this negotiation: China’s share of the assessed regular budget contribution rose from roughly 15 to 20 percent (3) and the 2026 budget round, conducted under the Secretary-General’s UN80 reform initiative, approved further reductions to the same pillar, with China and Russia jointly pushing to extend those cuts further still (4). Civil society space contracts every time this negotiation repeats, largely out of public view. In this way, budgetary pressures reinforce the earlier chokepoints, compounding who enters the system and is heard within it and compounding avenues to resist institutional strangulation. 

These chokepoints are cumulative rather than separate: accreditation determines who can enter the system, control of the floor determines who can be heard once inside, and budgetary pressure determines how much institutional capacity remains to respond. None needs to close the system outright. Together, they build upon one another and narrow the space for civil society at each stage under the guise of procedural complicity. 

3. What has worked, and what it cannot reach

It would be easy to end on the scale of the problem. The more useful record, after decades of watching this room, is of what has actually moved it, and one case carries the whole record in sequence.

In 2019, a diplomatic letter to the Human Rights Council raising concerns about Xinjiang was signed by over twenty states. Within months it was met by a counter-letter, built bilaterally and then mobilised as a bloc, drawing support from several dozen governments. The case did not stay at the level of dueling letters. In August 2022, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights published its own assessment of the situation in Xinjiang, released eleven minutes before midnight in Geneva on the final day of the outgoing High Commissioner’s term, after sustained pressure from Beijing not to publish it at all –  the kind of authoritative institutional documentation that a state can dismiss an activist for offering but has a far harder time dismissing when it comes from the UN’s own office. Weeks later, a motion to hold a Council debate on the findings failed by nineteen votes against to seventeen in favour with eleven abstentions (5). The Council had never previously been forced to vote on whether to put China’s human rights record on its own agenda. It lost, narrowly, but the vote happened, breaking a consensus that had never actually been real. A year later, in July 2023, ECOSOC granted consultative status to seven NGOs that had been held in deferral for at least four years, not through appeals to sympathy but through the same patient, rule-bound persistence that had blocked them in the first place.

Every one of those levers, documentation, a forced vote, procedural persistence, works within the room as built. They accept the architecture’s basic allocation and make it function more fairly inside that allocation. It is worth naming plainly what that allocation is. The UN system was built in 1945 on a specific division of labour: states would author the rules, and everyone else, peoples without states among them, would be their subjects, granted standing only at the discretion of the states that held it. Read that way, procedural capture is not a violation of the architecture’s spirit. It is a competent use of authority the architecture always assigned to states and never assigned to anyone else. UN80 cutting the human rights budget is not a loophole. It is the same authority, exercised through a reform process instead of through obstruction, arriving at the same result, and it is not only China’s authority to exercise. The United States’ own withdrawal from the Human Rights Council and non-payment of its contributions is a very differently motivated example of the same underlying move: an author of the system reasserting the authority the architecture always gave it, once the system stops being convenient.

This is not an argument that procedural defence or reform is pointless. The Xinjiang case shows both actually working, within their limits. It is an observation that neither one, on present evidence, touches the allocation problem underneath it. Whether that allocation can ever be revisited is not a question I think states, reforming or otherwise, will answer on their own. It has always been peoples without states, and the civil society built around them, who have forced authorship questions onto the agenda in the first place, UNPO’s own founding Declaration and its insistence on equal self-determination among them. If this allocation ever shifts, it will be because peoples asserted standing as authors rather than waited to be granted it, not because a seat-holder decided to share the seat.

This piece has stayed close to what can be documented and defended procedurally. The deeper question, what this pattern means for how the multilateral system allocates standing in the first place, and how far any reform can go while that allocation stays untouched, deserves its own treatment. 

(1)Raphaël Viana David, China’s Efforts to Block Civil Society Access to the United Nations (ISHR, April 2025) p. 28
(2) Ibid., p.30
(3) Raphaël Viana David, ‘New ISHR Report Reveals How Governments Work Behind the Scenes to Defund the UN’s Human Rights Work’ (ISHR, 21 October 2025)
(4) ISHR, ‘UN80 Reform: States Endorse Slashing of Human Rights Budget’ (9 January 2026)
(5) Amnesty International, ‘China: Xinjiang Vote Failure Betrays Core Mission of UN Human Rights Council’ (6 October 2022);
UNHRCl, ‘Human Rights Council Adopts 21 Texts and Rejects One Draft Decision’’ (6 October 2022)

Notes

Amnesty International, ‘China: Xinjiang Vote Failure Betrays Core Mission of UN Human Rights Council’ (6 October 2022) 

Costas M Constantinou and Fiona McConnell, ‘On the Right to Diplomacy: Historicizing and Theorizing Delegation and Exclusion at the United Nations’ (2023) 15 International Theory 53, 53–78.

Human Rights Watch, The Costs of International Advocacy: China’s Interference in United Nations Human Rights Mechanisms (5 September 2017) — Cao Shunli detention and Dolkun Isa premises ejection.

International Service for Human Rights, ‘UN80 Reform: States Endorse Slashing of Human Rights Budget’ (9 January 2026) 

Liddell, I., McConnell, F. and Nodari, T., Compromised Space: Bullying and Blocking at the UN Human Rights Mechanisms (Unrepresented Diplomats Project, July 2019) 

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), OHCHR Assessment of Human Rights Concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People’s Republic of China (31 August 2022)

Raphaël Viana David, China’s Efforts to Block Civil Society Access to the United Nations (International Service for Human Rights, April 2025) 

 Raphaël Viana David, ‘New ISHR Report Reveals How Governments Work Behind the Scenes to Defund the UN’s Human Rights Work’ (ISHR, 21 October 2025) 

UN Human Rights Council, ‘Human Rights Council Adopts 21 Texts and Rejects One Draft Decision, Extends Mandates on Older Persons, Right to Development, Arbitrary Detention, Mercenaries, Slavery, Indigenous Peoples, Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation’ (6 October 2022)