A U.N. office deepened its ties to a Chinese government office that carries out political repression in Hong Kong, with a top official from the international body also meeting the city’s leader, John Lee, on a recent trip.
It’s the latest example of growing U.N. ties to the Chinese government despite Beijing’s ongoing human-rights abuses there. Late last month, under the 2020 national-security law, a court convicted 14 pro-democracy leaders for subversion. The U.S. had sanctioned Lee for his role in implementing that law.
“The United Nations is little more than a glorified PR firm for the genocidal regime in Beijing,” Senator Marco Rubio told National Review in a statement.
Ghada Waly, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, which is dedicated to fighting drug-trafficking, terrorism, and corruption, traveled to Hong Kong on May 22, according to the organization’s website. She then traveled to Macau for meetings with officials there.
In Hong Kong, Waly spoke at a conference commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), which is the city’s anticorruption arm.
She also signed a memorandum of understanding with ICAC commissioner Woo Ying-ming to deepen UNODC’s partnership with Hong Kong.
All this was ostensibly intended to boost efforts against organized crime and other bad behavior, but Nate Sibley, the director of the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative, said that while UNODC does “a lot of good work” on that front, there’s cause for concern regarding its engagement with the ICAC.
Sibley noted that the ICAC commissioner reports directly to Lee and that “the agency is now operating within a system that has fully suborned rule of law to Communist Party priorities.”
“Sadly,” he said, “we cannot pretend that the ICAC will be insulated from political pressure to conform and enact the party’s will.”
Waly met Lee during her trip, according to the UNODC website, and they discussed fighting organized crime.
“The drug-trafficking and money-laundering organizations that Waly was presumably discussing with John Lee, CCP puppet, have been pretty clearly linked to the CCP itself by investigative reporting and congressional inquiries,” Sibley added.
One recent finding from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is that Beijing is subsidizing companies that have trafficked in fentanyl-precursor chemicals.
Sibley said that the ICAC has already been weaponized against Hong Kongers who have spoken out against the ruling regime. In 2023, the ICAC criminally charged a Hong Kong man for urging people not to vote by sharing a video in which a political commentator originally from the city but residing abroad urged people not to participate in the election, according to Voice of America. The ICAC also sought a warrant for the commentator’s arrest.
A UNODC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
“Gone are the days of reaffirming ‘faith in fundamental human rights.’ Instead, the U.N.’s primary mission now seems to be bashing America, Israel, and any other nation that shares our values,” Rubio said.
“I don’t expect the U.N. to change, but it would be nice if President Biden and [U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Linda] Thomas-Greenfield actually stood up for America for once,” he added.
A spokesman for the U.S. mission to the U.N. told NR: “The United States continues to uphold its clear position against the ongoing crackdown on human rights and fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong, and will continue to call for the immediate, unconditional release of all unjustly detained political prisoners,” adding that Washington will continue to work with its allies and partners to do so.
“The United States has made clear to both Hong Kong and PRC authorities that it will not hesitate to speak out against the deterioration of the rule of law and human rights in Hong Kong, nor to call out those responsible for the erosion of Hong Kong’s promised autonomy,” the spokesman added.
The UNODC has for years cozied up to China and other authoritarian regimes.
During a UNODC-organized anti-corruption conference in Atlanta last December, Waly spoke positively about China’s notoriously corrupt Belt and Road Initiative, appearing alongside Chinese government officials. Russia hosted an exhibition at the conference, and a UNODC official congratulated the country’s diplomats for organizing a postmarking competition focused on countering corruption.
In 2019, UNODC signed a cooperation agreement with China’s National Supervision Commission and later declined to make its contents public when asked to do so by the human-rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders.