How China and Russia shifted power balance at UN - and scored a win in their war on human rights

António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, has quietly begun to dismantle a key cell within his office charged with ensuring that the international body’s sprawling political and humanitarian agencies promote human rights.

The move comes mere months after China, with the support of Russia and other critics of the UN human rights mission, led a successful effort in an obscure but powerful UN budget committee to block a request by Guterres to fund the cell, which was established in 2014.

The development is just one of the latest signs that Beijing and Moscow are gradually gaining ground in their geopolitical struggle against the West to roll back decades of advances on human rights at the UN. But human rights proponents claim that the UN chief, as well as the United States and European countries, has done too little to resist the trend.

On a range of fronts, China and Russia have grown increasingly assertive in their efforts to curtail human rights advocacy, targeting financing for UN rights programmes, barring human rights defenders from participating in UN meetings, and ratcheting up pressure on smaller countries to vote alongside them in the UN Security Council. They have tapped into a growing aversion to advocacy from scores of governments that resent what they see as the West’s manipulation of human rights causes to punish political rivals.

“China is the real playmaker here. It has cleverly combined positive messaging over climate change and development with an increasingly uncompromising approach to limiting human rights,” says Richard Gowan, a UN expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “It can get away with this because a lot of diplomats view Chinese engagement at the UN as insurance against Trump walking away [from multilateralism].”