In September 2018, Venezuela’s Maduro regime was legitimized in an official report by Alfred de Zayas, the UN Human Rights Council’s Cuban-sponsored expert on ensuring “a democratic and equitable international order.” As UN Watch warned during Zayas’ visit to Venezuela — when he posted propaganda photos pretending that starving Venezuelans had an abundance of food — his outcome report was a complete whitewash of Maduro’s crimes, where the term “political prisoner” appears nowhere, and where dissident heroes like Leopoldo Lopez and Antonio Ledezma are condemned as warmongers. Sadly, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, the most influential NGOs in the UN human rights system, refused to criticize Zayas. More

In January 2018, the UN elected Turkey’s Erdogan regime — which arrests, jails and persecutes human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents — as Vice-Chair of the UN Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations, which accredits and supervises the activity of human rights groups at the UN. More

In May 2018, Cuba mocked the mandatory UN review of its human rights record by submitting hundreds of fake NGO submissions hailing the repressive regime’s human rights record, including from the “Cuban Federation of Canine Sports.” Cuba lashed out at UN Watch for exposing the fraud, and at Freedom House for helping to organize testimony of human rights activists on the margins of the UN review, including by the dissident Rosa Maria Paya. More

In 2018, Saudi Arabia, considered by many to be the most misogynistic regime in the world, secured key positions on the UN’s three principal women’s rights bodies:

• In March 2018, Saudi Arabia took its seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women—made possible by the votes of Belgium, Ireland and Sweden in an election the year prior, as exposed by UN Watch.

• in April 2018, Saudi Arabia was elected to the Executive Board of UN Women, also known as the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.

• In June 2018, Saudi Arabia’s candidate won a seat on the UN Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, a 23-member expert body.

As 2018 opened in January, UN officials continued to ignore Iran’s violent crackdown against mass protests that had begun days earlier. UN Watch’s tweet asking whether any UN officials at all had spoken out in defense of Iran’s victims went viral with 9,000 retweets and 15,000 likes. Only later was UN rights chief Zeid al-Hussein and other officials shamed into issuing a statement calling on the Iranian authorities to respect the rights of demonstrators and detainees. More

In October 2018, the UN broke its own rules by electing notorious human rights abusers to the 47-nation Human Rights Council. UN Watch exposed the scandal in a joint report with the Human Rights Foundation and the Raul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. The report was featured in a major article in The Guardian — entitled “Why are world’s worst violators joining UN human rights council?” — and was quoted by other newspapers around the world. UN Watch’s series of tweets about UNHRC membership went viral, shared by opinion leaders worldwide.

 In 2018, the UN General Assembly condemned Israel more times than it did all of the rest of the world put together. There were 21 one-sided resolutions on Israel, and six on on the other 192 countries of the world, with one resolution each to criticize Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russian actions in Crimea,  Myanmar, and the U.S. for its embargo on Cuba. Efforts by the U.S. to have the UNGA pass one resolution condemning Hamas, or to hold Cuba accountable for its human rights abuses, both failed. UN Watch exposed the hypocrisy to the world, covered in newspapers and social media.

When the UN reviewed the human rights record of Saudi Arabia and China — which Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth promised would be “tough probing” — the supposed audit in fact consisted of widespread praise for their human rights record. Saudi Arabia won praise from 75% of the delegations, while China topped that by winning praise from 86% of the speakers during its review. UN Watch exposed the fraud, as reported in The Washington Times: "U.N. praises Saudi Arabia on women’s rights."

In October 2018, UN Human Rights Council expert Idriss Jazairy — a former Algerian ambassador to the UN — presented a report to the General Assembly in which he lobbied on behalf of Belarus, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Qatar, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Yemen and Syria, arguing that the regimes were victims of unjust Western sanctions. In May, Jazairy issued a release following his visit to Syria "at the invitation of the Syrian government" in which he claimed that the Assad regime was a particular victim. More

In April, Assad's Syria, a regime with a well-known propensity for using chemical weapons against its own people, assumed the presidency of the UN-backed Conference on Disarmament — which deals with nuclear nonproliferation and the global conventions to ban biological and chemical weapons. UN Watch’s protest sparked a global firestorm, leading to the U.S. walking out, and the regime getting condemned by the representatives of the EU, Britain, Germany, France, Canada and the Netherlands.