Cuba, China, Sudan, Nicaragua, and Saudi Arabia. The names of these countries are synonymous with tyrannical governments, human rights abuses, and oppressed peoples. And yet representatives from the regimes of these countries all just secured spots on the United Nations committee for overseeing non-governmental rights organizations.
If the United Nations’ goal is to make a joke of itself and cheapen all its supposedly noble efforts, then it is doing a bang-up job. But perhaps we cannot expect anything else of an organization that literally hires Hamas terrorists. Why wouldn’t they ask human rights abusers from around the world to advise them on human rights?
Watchdog group UN Watch shared the news on the embarrassing new elections to the UN NGO committee:
INMATES RUNNING THE ASYLUM: The U.N. just elected China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan to their Committee on NGOs, which oversees the work of human rights groups at the U.N. and decides which to accredit.
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) April 10, 2026
ECOSOC members who backed this include:
🇬🇧🇪🇸🇨🇦🇫🇷🇩🇪🇳🇴🇳🇱🇦🇺🇨🇭🇦🇹🇫🇮 pic.twitter.com/sX2MNWoXPD
Probably most of us already know why these five dictatorships shouldn’t be involved in an NGO committee. But just in case anyone needs a refresher in specifics, let’s look at just a few reasons. We’ll break it down by country.
China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the worst mass-murdering regime in human history, at over 500 million victims and counting. In the last few years in particular, the CCP has been committing ethnic genocide, intensifying religious persecution, viciously cracking down on political dissidence, and running a dystopian and dictatorial social credit score to control each and every move, purchase, and statement that Chinese citizens make. The CCP thrives off abusive and slave labor. Outside its borders, it runs an international network of secretive police stations to persecute refugees and to target and harass anti-CCP individuals. The CCP has huge scandals for forced live organ harvesting, forced abortions, and widespread sex trafficking. Putting a CCP representative on the UN NGO committee is such a blatant insult to the alleged aim of the committee.
Read Also: America Begins Clearing Mines in Strait of Hormuz Because Iran Won’t
Cuba. My colleague Sarah Anderson has been reporting regularly on the energy and economic crisis in Cuba, where the dictatorial government is attempting to retain its oppressive control over its people while defying the U.S. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the Cuban dictatorship thus: “The only thing worse than a Communist is an incompetent Communist. And so their system of government has to change because they will never be able to develop economically without those changes.” Almost a third of Cubans deal with water shortages.
Significantly, the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s refugee daughter Alina Fernández Revuelta recently gave an interview describing how disastrous the Cuban regime had been for decades, how it caused mass deprivation of basic necessities, harshly persecuted and even killed dissidents, and exploited forced and child labor.
Sudan. The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and Sudanese Armed Forces have been devastating Sudan for years, displacing and killing countless civilians — even committing large-scale massacres — during their civil war.
While the world looks away, a brutal civil war is tearing Sudan apart.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 20, 2026
Millions have been displaced, famine is imminent and war crimes are being committed daily.
This is a humanitarian catastrophe that barely makes headlines.
Here's what you need to know 🧵 pic.twitter.com/behriADATB
Saudi Arabia. As a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship, Saudi Arabia enforces strict sharia, and even has a law on the books to punish converting away from Islam with death. Freedom House reported last year:
Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. Women and members of religious minority groups face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative.
And the UN thinks the Saudis should advise and supervise NGOs???
Nicaragua. The U.S. State Department reported in 2024, “The human rights situation in Nicaragua worsened during the year. The government intensified attacks on civil liberties and also violated religious liberty by harassing and detaining churchgoers and religious leaders.” The United Nations itself recently admitted that the regime in Nicaragua is repressive, and yet that doesn’t seem to prevent the UN from putting Nicaraguan representatives on important boards.
Sudan, Cuba, Nicaragua, China, and Saudi Arabia all persecute Christians. The Saudis already erased their Jewish population. Representatives from these governments should not be sitting on any board that has to do with human rights.
