GENEVA, September 13, 2024 — Today the UN rapporteur on sanctions will declare that all US, EU, British and Canadian sanctions on China over its human rights abuses constitute illegal “unilateral coercive measures” under international law.

Alena Douhan, a Belarus-based investigator who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council — under a mandate created by the Iranian regime and other dictatorships — will today in Geneva present a new report that calls for lifting all Western sanctions that have been imposed on the Chinese regime over its human rights abuses against Uighurs, including forced labor, stifling democracy in Hong Kong, and arming sanctioned regimes such as Russia, Iran and North Korea.

"Douhan epitomizes the Orwellian nature of the UN's human rights system. The world's worst dictatorships initiated this UN mandate ten years ago in order to declare that all sanctions which seek to hold accountable their regimes for human rights abuses are themselves illegal measures," said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, an independent non-governmental human rights group based in Geneva.

Neuer will be taking the floor today in the UN debate with Douhan.

"Absurdly, this so-called UN human rights expert has conducted major propaganda visits for Ayatollah Khamenei's Islamic Regime in Iran, Assad's Syria, Maduro's Venezuela, and now Xi Jinping's China. She inverts reality and morality by speaking out for the supposed human rights of the perpetrator regimes, instead of speaking for their victims," said Neuer.

(Watch Video: Alena Douhan at the conclusion of her May 2024 visit to China. “Unilateral sanctions against China do not conform with a broad number of international legal norms and cannot be justified as countermeasures under the law of international responsibility.”)

Prior to being selected for her post in March 2022, Douhan appeared on the 2017 biennial panel on unilateral coercive measures — dubbed the Mother of all Rogues’ Galleries — alongside other longtime UN apologists for dictators like  Jean Ziegler, Idris Jazairy and Alfred de Zayas.

In December 2022, when Iran was condemned at the UN for its assault on protesters in the wake of Mahsa Amini’s death, Douhan penned a letter to the United States blaming all of Iran’s problems on U.S. sanctions.

Douhan's Office Took $200,000 From China

In 2021, Douhan received $200,000 from China at the same time as she helped the regime whitewash its ethnic cleansing of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, appearing at a Chinese regime propaganda event falsely portraying Xinjiang as a utopia. 

All of Douhan’s country visits to date — to Iran, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Qatar, and Syria — have been propaganda opportunities for those regimes to whitewash their human rights abuses.

Her report on Syria, which she visited in 2022, commended the Assad regime for its "cooperation," and declared that Western sanctions against the regime “may amount to a crime against humanity, against all Syrian people.”