A report released by UN Watch titled "UN Rights Chief Turned Blind Eye to World's Worst Regimes" claimed that Turk condemned the United States and Israel more frequently than China, North Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar combined. This is despite the well-documented human rights atrocities of those regimes.
"When victims cry out for justice, the last thing they need is a global human rights leader turning away in silence," Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, told Fox Business. "During his two years as the world's highest human rights official, Volker Turk routinely avoided criticizing some of the world's worst human rights abusers, many of them powerful players at the UN who sit on its Human Rights Council, such as China, Qatar, and Cuba. For example, so far in the two years of his tenure, Turk has failed to initiate a single statement about China's forced detention of a million Uyghurs. The world's top human rights official, who is uniquely authorized to act independently and hold governments to account, needs to speak truth to power and not pull punches in deference to political pressure."
"His focus on condemning certain democracies far more than gross abusers of human rights such as North Korea, Cuba, and Qatar," he continued, "is absurd and immoral."
The report found that Turk was fixated on condemning Israel, the sole democracy in the Middle East, and had issued 58 condemnations over the past two years, with the majority of these condemnations focusing on the Hamas-Israel conflict. To provide context, he criticized the Maduro regime four times during the same two-year period, according to the report. Additionally, Turk has issued more statements regarding Gaza than his combined statements regarding Ukraine, Sudan, and Myanmar. For example, the Sudanese conflict which began in 2023 has already resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians and the creation of more than 2 million external refugees. This figure is equivalent to the total number of refugees in Gaza. An additional 7.7 million Sudanese have been internally displaced.
"While democracies must be held to account, a moral and merits-based approach would demand that the High Commissioner devote more of his office's limited time and resources to those human rights victims in the world who suffer severe and systematic oppression, and who have no recourse to free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, and other basic institutions of democracy that act as a check and balance to executive power," Hillel Neuer said. "Mr. Volker Turk has failed to be a moral voice for the millions of human rights victims who most require the world's help, and he has failed to speak out boldly in the face of egregious human rights violations."
"The role of the UN rights chief is not to appease abusive regimes but to hold them accountable. By failing to name and shame the worst violators, Volker Turk has betrayed countless victims of tyranny and repression," he added. "In light of our findings, we are calling on Mr. Turk to resign from his post. In the event that he has not resigned by January 1, we are calling on all Western democracies to pull out of the UNHRC. It is time to stop lending legitimacy to a UN human rights system that has become corrupted by selectivity, politicization, and the dangerous domination of dictatorships."
