We could look at grand issues for reform, but these are very elusive at the UN. It is difficult to achieve grand reform at the UN. We could look at simple things that could be done more concretely.
One is to clean up who gets to sit in judgment. Just as we spoke about before, the UN Human Rights Council includes China, Cuba and Qatar. We need to clean that up. We need to have standards on who gets to be there. The UN General Assembly decided that there should be standards when they created the Human Rights Council in resolution 60/251. They said there should be standards, but they're ignored. Either we uphold the standards and we stop supporting the presence of the Islamic Republic of Iran, China and Cuba on these bodies, or we say there are no standards and everyone gets to be on it. It's one or the other. That has to be decided, because otherwise you allow dictatorships to wear a false badge of international legitimacy, and they say, “Here's a body that has criteria, and we made it on to it.” That has to stop.
Second, the UN system has to clean up its own credibility. Currently we have a situation in which external actors can fund UN special rapporteurs. A report that we have coming out in the next couple of weeks shows that there are UN rapporteurs who are getting around $1 million from the Chinese Communist regime. One of them is a law professor in Australia named Ben Saul. He received $150,000 from the Chinese Communist regime for his work. How can you be a human rights expert and receive that kind of money from one of the world's most repressive regimes? That has to be cleaned up. There should be no earmarked funding from anyone, and certainly not from a dictatorship.
We need to clean up the standards for UN reporting. Currently, UN reports are cited by international courts, yet there is very little in the way of standards for evidence sourcing and methodology. If these reports are being cited by courts, they need to meet courtroom-level standards.
Finally, I would say we need accountability for misconduct. We need a complaints mechanism that has consequences. There are UN officials who are acting as apologists for the world's worst regimes. There's a UN expert named Alena Douhan. She has flown into Damascus, Tehran, Caracas and Zimbabwe to embrace the regimes. These kinds of people need to be suspended, reprimanded or removed if they're violating the UN code of conduct.