cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/59707903
Opinion piece by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, a human rights lawyer and trustee at the UN’s fund for torture victims.
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The UN is in deep structural debt. The US alone withholds $1.5bn in dues, while many countries pay late or not at all, with little or no consequence. UN80 reforms have significantly shrunk operations. The UN secretary general António Guterres has warned of looming financial collapse.
There is evidence that the crisis is intentional. A 2025 investigation by the International Service for Human Rights documented how a bloc led by China and Russia used budget committees in New York to systematically block and cut funding for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Human Rights Council, while the US’s neglect to pay compounds the damage. These efforts are consistent with longstanding strategies: weaken the institution until it appears irrelevant, then occupy its remains with regressive actors.
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Strip the funding, and that accountability disappears – this is already visible with treaty bodies and special procedures forced this year to reduce sessions and country visits. The voluntary fund dropped by 88 per cent from 2025 to 2026, leaving thousands of torture victims without the psychosocial support they need.
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Dag Hammarskjöld famously said that the UN was meant to keep us from hell, not deliver heaven. But human beings deserve more than purgatory: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promises a world in which we are all born free and equal in dignity and rights. We must not settle for less.
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It’s really sad that the best international diplomatic institution we could build after slaughtering each other on an unprecedented scale lasted only as long as the world’s top military power wanted it to, and is now slowly dying because that power no longer wants to support it.
There are more countries than just one that no longer want to support the UN. These are particularly the U.S., China, and Russia. They all three have no interest in human rights.
