Alena Douhan is a U.N. special rapporteur who has consistently used her post to boost the interests of anti-U.S. dictatorships. Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation today that seeks to abolish her job.
Douhan’s position concerns “unilateral coercive measures” — a term that dictatorships use at the U.N. in a campaign to undermine international sanctions that have been imposed in response to their abuses.
Ostensibly, Douhan, a professor at Belarusian State University, is acting in her own independent capacity. But since she took this post in 2020, she has almost exclusively advocated the removal of all sanctions targeting China, Belarus, Venezuela, Iran, and other aligned countries. China and Russia have both earmarked funding to support the work of her U.N. office.
A recent trip that Douhan took to China appears to have been the final straw for Rubio. She visited Xinjiang and echoed the Chinese Communist Party’s line that the only human-rights abuses taking place in the region are Western sanctions that target officials complicit in Beijing’s genocide of Uyghurs there. In a letter to Biden last month, after Douhan’s return, Rubio said “these moves are designed to serve as anti-U.S. guardrails and propaganda reference points for the CCP and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian agendas,” and he encouraged the president to re-evaluate U.S. funding to the U.N.
The Biden administration has said that the U.S. votes against the existence of the “unilateral coercive measures” post at every possible opportunity. Rubio’s bill adds teeth to the U.S. position by reducing U.S. contributions to the U.N. by an amount equal to 25 percent of the budget of the rapporteur’s office. That by itself would hardly force the office’s closure, as most U.N. rapporteurs receive minimal budgetary support, but it would represent a first step.