Tabea, happy Saturday/Sunday,

Sorry, with a flight a couple of hours away, I accidentally scheduled this newsletter to be sent out next Saturday not THIS Saturday. Again, sorry for the delay.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about today is.

Awareness, and if that's enough. If not, what else should you do?

A great speech, a standing ovation, someone screen recording your statement off UN Web TV and posting it to Facebook, all of that raises awareness and gets your voice heard, but none of it actually moves anything. The only real measurement of progress is whether the text actually changed.

I have watched this pattern for two decades.

Handshakes, warm eye contact, someone telling you that you have an ally in them, and then when the actual moment comes, nowhere to be seen. Stakeholder maps, strategy documents, procrastination dressed up in a suit. I got sick of walking out of rooms with a stack of beautiful documents and nothing to show for it, so I built myself a system.

I call it Power GPS.

Three satellites, one triangulation

Satellite one is your objective, and I mean a destination, not a direction.

“We want more participation” is a direction. You cannot measure arrival at a direction, so missing it teaches you nothing. A destination is a specific clause, a specific seat, a line in a named text, something you can actually clock arrival at.

If you miss it, that is fine, because now you have data on how far you got and why.

Satellite two is micro coalitions, and this is the one people get wrong most often. It runs much more granular than “let’s get Canada on board” or “let’s get the EU.”

I keep a Notion doc with fifty of these mapped out.

Gulf Cooperation Council progressive members. Countries with strong Indigenous movements. Environmental pioneer countries like Bhutan, Costa Rica, Denmark. West African coastal states. Every one is a hypothesis you test. Some work and you keep them. Some do not and you retract them, like an accordion, built around interest rather than geography.

Satellite three is platform culture, knowing the actual room you are in.

The Human Rights Council is a different animal from the General Assembly, which is a different animal from BBNJ, which is a different animal from a CBD COP, even when one is technically subsidiary to another. Every platform has its own protocol, its own unwritten rules about who speaks first, who needs a private word before they will say yes in public.

You do not get handed these rules. You reverse engineer them by watching, every single time, before you ever open your mouth.

Where all three satellites overlap is your sweet spot.

If your goal is three references to Indigenous Peoples in an adequate housing resolution, and your coalition is Panama, Bolivia, and Colombia, and you know how the Human Rights Council handles that resolution, that triangle is where your message gets pinpointed instead of sprayed everywhere and hoped for.

Then comes the part almost nobody actually does.

Four questions, after every intervention, every bilateral, every vote.

What was supposed to happen. What actually happened. Why the gap. What did I learn. I picked this up from a military documentary about an air force unit, where the officer said the debrief matters more than the mission itself, no ranks in the room, because that is the only way people actually improve for next time.

The four questions cost me about ten minutes a day. They have probably saved me years.

I call the whole approach spray and pray, but with strategy. And I want to be precise about what that means, because it is not the same as throwing spaghetti at the wall, like spraying one message everywhere and hoping.

The old playbook was a single one pager, carpet bombing the entire city of Geneva with the same line, because there are so many delegations living in that city that one message never lands the same way twice.

The new version is still wide.

You are still putting things out into a lot of rooms. But each version is tailored to the specific micro coalition receiving it, 10 or 15 different packages carrying the same core position, instead of one generic package sent to everyone and forgotten.

The volume side of the system shows up here.

In a single Bonn inter-sessional I once scheduled 22 bilateral meetings, 40 minutes each, because good luck getting a real bilateral inside COP itself. Every one of those meetings fed straight back into the four questions and into the coalition map. It looks tidy on a page.

It runs on a lot of unglamorous volume underneath.

Before you go

The usual roadblock here is that people try to stand up all three satellites at once, decide the whole thing is too elaborate for the time they have, and quietly go back to working on instinct.

Build one.

Take your next intervention and write down the destination only, a clause, a seat, a line you could point at afterwards and say we got that or we did not. Leave the coalition map and the platform reading for later. One satellite used properly will outperform three you abandoned in week two.

I built this out of post-it notes on a wall long before I owned an iPad, trying to find the pattern underneath years of BBNJ and World Conference negotiations.

I do not do well with rigid scripts, so think of this as Minecraft, not Tetris.

I am handing you the raw materials, three satellites and four questions, so you can build whatever the room in front of you actually requires.

20 years, same system.

Go build your own version of it.

See you next week.

P.S: Check it out, the Substack is now (also) organized by process: BBNJ, Article 6, UN80. Now, you can follow one stream without being drowned in everything. Let me know what you think!

P.P.S:

What you’ll hear:

• If the General Assembly parent resolution has conflated language, every other body uses it as cover to justify conflation in their own texts. That is the upstream battle nobody is fighting and I explain…

Read more

Contribution without authority

Here’s the first one, and it’s the line I’d want you to remember if you only remember one. Indigenous knowledge showing up late in a process isn’t the same as Indigenous knowledge shaping that process.

If the categories are already fixed, if the assessment is already framed, if the proposal already exists on paper, and Indigenous knowledge only enters through a consultation bolted onto the end, that’s not co-creation. I called it, on the panel, contribution without authority.

You can see exactly what this looks like with marine protected areas, MPAs for short, the actual zones BBNJ will designate for protection. Picture the moment an Indigenous knowledge holder looks at a shortlist of proposed areas and says, that’s not the strongest site, the better one is over here.

If that conversation happens after the shortlist is locked, the knowledge holder is reacting to someone else’s frame. If it happens while the shortlist is still being built, they’re shaping the outcome. Same person, same knowledge, same expertise.

Completely different amount of power, depending only on timing.

That’s why timing and location are the whole fight, not a technical footnote to it. Once knowledge enters an institution, the institution decides what counts, what gets translated, what gets validated, what gets quietly set aside.

Show up before that filter exists, and you’re part of building it. Show up after, and you’re asking permission to be heard by it.

The fight over who picks the people in the room

Second thing.

There’s a proposal on the table for a dedicated Indigenous advisory mechanism, sitting inside the BBNJ structure, with Indigenous experts placed as actual members, not observers, in bodies like the Scientific and Technical Body and the clearinghouse mechanism, and eventually every subsidiary body under the COP.

If you read the Austria piece, you already know this fight, state-controlled nomination deciding who counts as a legitimate Indigenous voice.

This mechanism is the answer to that, scaled up on purpose. Instead of fighting nomination rules body by body, the proposal builds one standing structure, grounded in Indigenous self-selection, organized around the seven Indigenous sociocultural regions the UN system already recognizes, and it plugs that structure directly into every room where the actual work happens.

Self-selection instead of state-controlled nomination. That’s the whole mechanism, in five words. And it’s the difference, as I put it on the panel, between being heard and having influence.

We are not a vulnerable group

Third thing, and it came up when I circled back near the end.

Under international law, Indigenous Peoples are not a vulnerable group and not a generic stakeholder category. We’re distinct rights holders, which is exactly why the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sits inside the treaty’s preamble and not off in some side annex.

That distinction isn’t academic. It changes what kind of seat you’re entitled to ask for. A vulnerable group gets consulted. A rights holder gets to help write the rules.

This old line covers it better than I can: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Being at that table, structurally, permanently, not as a favor granted meeting by meeting, is the actual ask underneath everything else I said that day.

Why three dozen references still isn’t enough

BBNJ’s text is genuinely strong on paper.

Over three dozen references to Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, rights, and values. All decisions are supposed to be made using the best available science and the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples together.

That’s the hard law, and it’s real, and it’s more than a lot of treaties manage.

But hard law sitting in a text and hard law operating inside a room are two different things, and the distance between them is exactly what the next few years, leading up to COP1, are going to be spent closing or failing to close.

I said this to close out the panel, and I’ll say it again here:

The real test isn’t whether Indigenous knowledge gets welcomed rhetorically. The real test is whether the system gets built so that knowledge can shape outcomes, enter early, and stay governed with integrity the whole way through.

That’s where co-creation stops being a word people use in opening remarks and starts being something that actually happened.

Listen to what he actually says in there:

• 2,600 international bureaucrats, gone.

• 25% of peacekeepers, gone.

• An 18% budget cut, the first real one in the organization’s history.

• And the US withholding its entire 25% share of the funding until it sees the reforms it wants. His words: “If we don’t see the reform, we don’t pay.” Get back to basics, stop wars, and drop “all this gender, climate, all this other nonsense.”

Now understand what you just watched.

UN80 was supposed to be a birthday. The organization turning 80, anniversary events, celebration, the whole thing. Instead, the biggest funder walked in, put the money on the table, and said: reforms or nothing.

That’s how UN80 went from a celebration to a hostage situation. And I don’t use those words lightly. When someone holds the thing you need and names the price of getting it back, there’s a word for that, and I just used it.

Everything I’m about to show you, every country, every position, every vote, is happening inside that hostage situation. That’s the context. Don’t lose it.

Okay.

Now, if you’re new to this, let me set the table, because I need you to actually understand what’s happening here, not just nod along.

The UN runs on things called mandates.

A mandate is just an instruction from countries to the UN: Write this report, hold this meeting, create this expert position, investigate this situation. Every mechanism you care about, the Special Rapporteur, the Expert Mechanism, the Permanent Forum, all of it exists because of mandates.

And this year, for the first time in about 20 years, the countries of the world sat down to decide how mandates get created, reviewed, merged, and killed. That process produced a resolution called 80/251. It passed the General Assembly on March 31.

So when I tell you what these countries said in those rooms, I’m not giving you gossip. I’m telling you who’s going to decide whether the things protecting your community still exist in 3 years. That’s the whole reason to read this.

The scoreboard first

The final vote was 168 in favour, 4 against, zero abstentions. And by the way, if you saw a 149-3-1 number floating around earlier, that number was wrong. 168-4-0. That’s the real count.

Russia forced that vote. Russia also tried to amend the text and tried to stretch the talks another month, and both of those attempts got killed by something called a “no action” motion, which Norway and Switzerland put forward.

What’s a no action motion?

It’s when the room votes to not even discuss your amendment. Over 90 countries backed it. Twice. Think about what that means. The room didn’t just disagree with Russia. The room refused to even have the conversation.

Now, here’s what matters going forward.

A new Working Group started May 1 and has to finish by April 30, 2027. The rules for reviewing existing mandates, and yes, that includes Human Rights Council mandates, are due in August 2026. And in December 2026, the Secretary-General delivers a list of mandates that are “inactive, duplicative, or fully implemented.” I call that the kill list, because that’s what it is. It’s the menu of things that can get retired.

One more date. A new Secretary-General takes office January 2027. Right in the middle of all this. Hold that thought, we’re coming back to it.

The two rooms, and why you can’t understand anything without this

Okay, this is the single most important thing in this whole piece, so I’m going to take my time with it.

There are two rooms. There’s the room where countries give speeches and vote on resolutions. And there’s the room where countries decide what actually gets money. The second room is called the Fifth Committee. It sits in New York, and it controls the budget for the entire UN system. Every mandate, every mechanism, every report, if it costs money, and everything costs money, the Fifth Committee decides whether it gets funded.

And before anything even reaches the Fifth Committee, it goes through a body called the ACABQ, the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions. I know, terrible name. Here’s what it does. The ACABQ reviews the Secretary-General’s budget proposals before the countries ever debate them, and it shapes the actual staff positions, the travel money, the conference support, the real working capacity behind a mandate. Which means cuts can get locked in there, quietly, technically, before the political fight even begins.

So here’s the game, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.

A country votes yes on something in Geneva. Big speech, warm words, everyone claps. Then that same country’s delegation shows up at the Fifth Committee in New York and votes against funding the exact thing they just voted for. Same government. Two rooms. Two completely different answers.

And nobody has to be the villain in either room, because the yes vote happened over here and the no vote happened over there and most people are only watching one room.

Every country I’m about to walk you through, you have to read them through both rooms. The Geneva or UNGA speech is half the position. The Fifth Committee vote is the other half.

Reading only one is how people get played.

The countries pushing hardest for reform

Let me start with the states driving this thing. Some of them sound like allies. Some of them are allies. But read the fine print on every single one.

United States

You already watched their position. The video at the top of this piece is the US position, stated more honestly on a podcast than it ever gets stated in the room. Everything their diplomats said over these 8 months is the polished version of what Waltz said into that microphone.

Inside the room, they came out swinging on literally day one, November 14. Their whole argument was money: $360 million a year spent on meetings and reports, reports that are 40% longer than they were 20 years ago. The US delegate literally said “I’ll buy dinner” for anyone who can prove those reports are worth it. That’s the energy they brought to the first meeting.

By March they sent their ambassador, who called the text “strong and balanced,” warned everyone against watering it down, and said that resisting a new Working Group would be “a pretty big cop out.” And then he said the quiet part out loud, on the record: “We can make the United Nations great again.” He actually said that. In the room.

Now here’s what you have to hold in your head at the same time. While saying all this, the US is withholding its entire 25% contribution, exactly like Waltz said in the video, and 95% of the $1.6 billion in unpaid dues to the UN is American. So understand what’s happening: The speeches are theater. The money is the actual play. The US doesn’t need to win arguments in the room because it’s already holding the hostage outside the room.

What do I expect from them? Maximum pressure through the budget, and the most aggressive possible definition of the word “duplication.” Remember that word. When the Working Group defines it, watch whose pen is moving.

European Union

The EU has been pro-reform from the start. Fewer meetings, shorter reports, they even wanted AI tools in the mandate registry from day one. In March they were the biggest supporters of the new tools and wanted the Working Group to have real teeth.

But here’s the thing about the EU, and I say this with respect for the people in those delegations. Every single statement they’ve made since April carries the same caveat, almost word for word: efficiency can’t come at the cost of human rights capacity. Every statement. Like clockwork.

And that red line already got crossed. The 2026 budget cut the human rights office deeper than the other two pillars of the UN, and the EU pushed back, and then accepted it. No vote forced. Nothing. So when I tell you their protective language is real but soft, that’s not me being cynical, that’s me reading what already happened.

What I expect? Expect a reliable pro-reform vote that defends human rights in speeches and folds under consensus pressure when the money’s on the table. Plan around that.

Australia, Canada, New Zealand (they negotiate together as CANZ)

These three started with something you almost never hear in a UN room: Honesty about themselves. Their opening statement said, basically, we the member states made this mess. We created too many mandates, too many meetings, and now the system is drowning. Our own doing.

In March, when other countries complained that a new Working Group would cost too much, Australia put the actual number on the table: $200,000 over 18 months, and called it value for money. They also said, straight up, that line-by-line negotiation would have killed this whole process. That’s a direct shot at Russia, and everybody in the room knew it.

But then something interesting happened, and this is why you read the fine print. On reviewing mandates, CANZ wants everything, maximum ambition. On the merger of two UN agencies (UNFPA and UN Women, the ones handling reproductive health and women’s rights), CANZ suddenly got very, very careful.

They asked where the analysis was behind the claimed savings. They pointed out the assessment had no legal analysis and considered no alternatives. They said protecting the mandates “may be difficult to guarantee within a merger scenario.” Their words.

So I expect a split personality: Hardline on mandate review, evidence-demanding on mergers. And they’ve already said publicly that the next Secretary-General needs to be a committed reformer. They’re playing the transition. Smart.

Norway and Switzerland

Simple story here. These are the two countries that actually saved the resolution. Their no-action motions are the only reason Russia’s amendments died. When the August fight comes and the text is under attack again, these two carry the shield again. That’s their job and they’re good at it.

Singapore and the Small States Group

Pay attention to this one, because it matters way more than people realize. The Small States Group is 52 to 55 countries, from every region, developed and developing together. Which means whatever they endorse gets to call itself cross-regional. That’s power.

Their whole argument is actually beautiful in its simplicity: small states get hurt most when the system is overloaded, because a delegation of 3 people cannot track 40,000 mandates. So the new tools, the registry, the concept notes, those help small delegations keep up. And notice what that does. The cautious camp says these tools burden developing countries. The Small States Group, full of developing countries, says the opposite. That argument war is not settled.

They haven’t committed yet on the Human Rights Council mandate question. Whoever wins them over gets to tell the legitimacy story. I’m watching them closely.

Liechtenstein

The thinker of the reform camp. Cost every resolution. Break the habit that every resolution automatically needs a report. And here’s my favorite moment: Their ambassador admitted, on the record, that member states “have lost our way a little bit” in how sloppily they write mandates. When Liechtenstein starts hedging, the small-state wing of the reform camp is cracking. They haven’t started hedging.

Japan, Korea, Romania, the UK, Croatia

Steady reform votes all year. Romania gave the single best argument for putting a deadline on the new Working Group: The working group on GA revitalization has existed for 20 years. Twenty years! That’s the alternative to deadlines, and everyone knows it.

The countries that fought it

Russia

Russia’s position never moved one inch in 8 months, and honestly, you have to respect the consistency even while you fight it. Day one: decisions belong to member states, period, and the Secretariat should advise only when asked. Everything else is overreach.

By March they were saying the new tools “must remain strictly auxiliary,” that they were “flabbergasted” anyone would oppose line-by-line negotiation, and they opposed basically every new idea in the text. Then they lost everything. Amendments dead. Vote forced. 168 to 4, with only Belarus, Nicaragua, North Korea, and Iran anywhere near them.

And then came the pivot, and this is the part you actually need to watch.

From April on, Russia stopped fighting the resolution, because that fight was over, and started fighting the implementation. Suddenly it’s all questions: Which proposals get member state decisions? Why is nobody talking about geographic representation of UN staff?

And in June, Russia did something clever: It publicly backed Palau and the Solomon Islands, small island states, on their demand for clarity about how reform proposals get approved. Russia wrapping itself in small island credibility. That was not an accident, absolutely not.

One more thing, and remember the two rooms.

In December, at the Fifth Committee, Russia co-led the yearly motion to completely defund 18 Human Rights Council investigations, and called them “anti-Russian and anti-Belarusian” out loud. That motion lost 85 to 14. They run it every single year. They’ll run it again.

What to expect? War by procedure inside the new Working Group. Here’s why that matters. The plenary vote is majority rules, and Russia loses majority votes. But working groups run on consensus culture, and consensus culture gives a determined loser power that votes take away. Line-by-line demands on the August rules. Budget challenges on everything. More borrowing of legitimate small-state concerns as cover. That’s what I expect.

Belarus

Almost silent all year. One procedural complaint. Belarus exists in this process to second whatever Russia says. Expect nothing independent, ever.

Nicaragua

One real intervention all year: The new Working Group is duplication, and cross-cutting criteria hurt developing countries. Then voted no. But here’s why Nicaragua matters more than its silence suggests: it makes sovereignty arguments in development language. It’s the translator between Russia’s bloc and the skeptics inside the G77. When you hear Nicaragua’s phrasing coming out of other delegations’ mouths, that’s the bridge working.

North Korea and Iran: invisible in the working meetings, spoke against at the adoption. They’re votes, not voices.

The middle, where the real fight lives now

Now we get to the interesting part.

These next countries all voted yes. All of them. And every single one of them wants the implementation on a shorter leash. 6 months from now, the real fight is not with Russia. The real fight is right here in the middle, over how sharp this thing actually gets. So let me walk you through them one by one.

China

If you understand China’s game, you understand half the board, so let me take my time here.

Day one, China’s statement was fully supportive of efficiency and reform. And in the same breath: By the way, we paid our $680 million contribution in full, and we urge “the largest contributor” to do the same. Friendly tone. Knife inside it. That’s the whole China approach in one sentence.

In March, China said: “we do not support the establishment of a new Working Group.” Warned about creating a “super mechanism above all existing bodies.” Wanted everything case by case, by consensus, through existing structures. Their deputy ambassador literally closed with a proverb about how a thousand-mile journey starts with one step, meaning: Slow down.

And then China voted yes anyway. Why? Because China does not stand alone in a 168-4 room. That’s not how they play.

Now, the two rooms.
Remember December at the Fifth Committee?

China tabled every single proposal to cut the human rights office deeper. Every one. While carving out protection for exactly 2 initiatives: The ones China itself runs at the Human Rights Council. And China’s own contribution, wired on December 27, arrived too late to spend, which is a big part of why $300 million had to be handed back unspent.

So what do you expect from the smartest player on the board?

This: Inside the Working Group, China will support “efficiency” whenever it kills mandates China dislikes, and will invoke “developing country concerns” whenever that protects mandates China likes. Both positions, same country, deployed as needed. China is the state most likely to quietly shape what “duplication” ends up meaning.

Never, ever read China’s General Assembly speeches without its Fifth Committee record sitting right next to them. It’s one strategy wearing two outfits.

Pakistan

Pakistan is, honestly, the sharpest lawyer in the room, and I mean that as a real compliment. Not just at the UNGA, but also at the HRC (I always have to suit up in the Indigenous Peoples resolution).

On January 26, Pakistan was the first country to say the thing: This process was supposed to be a review of how mandates get implemented, and it has quietly turned into a review of whether mandates should exist. One sentence. Everything the cautious camp argued for the next 5 months was built on top of that one sentence.

In March, Pakistan went through the draft paragraph by paragraph like a contract lawyer. Called one paragraph “factually incorrect,” and backed it up. Demanded deletions. Told the room a story about a government that once created a committee to review all its other committees, which got the point across better than an hour of speeches.

And their big consistent demand: The safeguards protecting certain mandates from review must follow into every downstream process. Everything that comes after.

Here’s the part I need you to actually use.

Pakistan said some mandates are “inconvenient for some but essential for many others.” Sit with that for a moment. That is a mandate-protection argument, fully formed, sitting right there, from a country nobody accuses of being soft on sovereignty. You can borrow that argument. It’s already been made for you, me, us.

Egypt

Watch Egypt’s movie, because it’s the best character arc in this whole story.

Egypt started as a blocker. Concept notes shouldn’t be mandatory. Putting cost figures in them would turn every negotiation into a budget fight. And my favorite line of the whole process: “establishing new bodies is the antithesis of what we are trying to achieve.” That’s a blocker talking.

Then watch what happened.

By April, Egypt was presenting a careful 4-part risk framework on the agency merger, covering mandate protection, operations, funding, and transition, and it landed almost word for word where Australia landed a few days later.

Egypt and Australia. Same page. Neither one planned it. Egypt also launched its own dialogue series on financing the UN’s field presence, which is what a country does when it’s building a platform.

Egypt is turning from blocker into broker. And here’s what you need to know about brokers: Brokers write the compromises. When merger criteria hit the Working Group, do not be surprised when the final landing zone has Egyptian fingerprints all over it.

India

India is the swing state, and India knows it’s the swing state, which makes it twice as interesting.

India backed the ambitious outcome and backed the new Working Group with a hard deadline, which split it from the cautious camp on day one. But India has one sharp edge, and for us it’s the most important sentence any country said all year: The exemption protecting mandates from review must be limited to “foundational and universal norm setting mandates.” Said very direct. Said repeatedly. Narrower than anyone else wanted.

Why does that matter to you?

Because whether something counts as a “foundational norm-setting mandate” is exactly the question that decides whether Indigenous-relevant mandates are protected from this review or exposed to it. That’s the whole ballgame, and India is holding the definition.

India also wants UN staff moved to Global South duty stations, ties everything back to Security Council reform, and was warmer on the agency merger than Australia was.

What I expect? I expect India to trade. Efficiency support in exchange for representation wins. If you get a chance to engage India, engage them on the definition of norm-setting. The definition. Specifically. Not the vibes around it.

Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Syria, El Salvador

All voted yes while asking for tighter member state control. Cuba runs its annual attempt to delete certain references at budget time, loses, and files again the next year, which tells you something about persistence as strategy. Saudi Arabia says little in the working meetings and negotiates hard everywhere else. None of these four will lead anything. All of them will amplify whichever direction the middle tilts.

The developing country mainstream

The G77 plus China, with Uruguay holding the pen

The G77 is the big negotiating bloc of developing countries, 134 of them, and Uruguay delivered its statements all year. In March: mandates are the “exclusive prerogative of member states,” respect the diversity of mandates, no one-size-fits-all. On the new Working Group, the G77 said it “remains engaged in internal deliberations,” which is diplomat language for “our members don’t agree with each other.” And they didn’t.

The cautious camp (Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Cuba) and the tool-friendly members (the Small States Group overlap, the Caribbean states) were in the same tent pulling opposite directions all year.

From April on, every single G77 statement opened with the same sentence: Reforms “should not lead to the dilution of development mandates.” Four meetings in a row. Same sentence. And here’s the thing, when 134 countries repeat one sentence four times, that sentence is the whole position. Everything else is decoration.

I expect unity on protecting the development pillar and cracks on everything else. August will strain this group hard. Watch Uruguay’s pen.

The South American group that keeps breaking ranks

Okay. This is the most useful thing on the entire map, so if you only remember one section, make it this one.

For 2 years running, a group of South American countries, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Uruguay, joined lately by the Bahamas, Guatemala, and Mexico, has broken away from the G77’s line at the Fifth Committee to table their own proposals defending full funding for Human Rights Council mandates. On the record.

Against the cuts.

Their argument, in their words: “blanket reductions risk undermining mandate delivery.”

Have they won a vote yet? No. They’ve lost every one.

But here’s what happened in December that should make you sit up straight: They picked up new supporters from outside the region. Cabo Verde. Mauritius. Maldives. And what pulled those three in? Climate-related human rights mandates. Countries facing rising seas realized the budget cuts were coming for the mandates connecting climate to human rights, and they crossed over.

Add this up.

Chile led a 40-state statement in December warning about the budget squeeze on human rights. 92 states signed a pledge in March to defend human rights through the whole UN80 process. Three years ago, none of this existed. Zero.

So here’s my read:

This group is small, it keeps losing, and it keeps growing at the same time. And the climate argument that pulled in Cabo Verde, Mauritius, and Maldives works the exact same way for Indigenous rights mandates. Same logic, same door. That’s where the alliance-building energy should go. Not toward the states already with us. Toward that door.

The Pacific and small island states

Solomon Islands speaking for the Pacific Islands Forum, Palau for the small island alliance, plus Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga. These countries voted for the resolution, they genuinely want efficiency, and they completely depend on UN field presence at the same time. Pulled in every direction at once, and honestly, fair enough.

By June their key demand crystallized into one clean question: Tell us exactly how these reform proposals get approved by member states. Completely fair question. And then Russia immediately endorsed it, which tells you the question has power, and also tells you the PSIDS are careful about who’s standing next to them when they ask it.

Their demand is legitimate and it’s separable from Russia’s use of it. I hope the association won’t poison it. I can see them joining the South American group soon.

The African Group

Not one unified actor in this process yet, and that’s the story. South Africa argued for the new Working Group’s machinery while staying with the G77 on substance. Zambia, Senegal, and South Africa spoke in favour at the adoption. Mali and Angola stayed procedural.

But here’s the data point that matters.

When the South Americans broke ranks on human rights funding in December, the African Group mostly stayed quiet. Only Cabo Verde and Mauritius crossed. That quiet is the gap.

And we already know from the toxics resolution that the African Group will take real ownership of a rights mandate when somebody does the unglamorous cross-ministry legwork of connecting their Geneva people to their other delegations. Somebody’s been doing that legwork, and if you paid attention to the UN80 360 degree briefing you know who did that legwork.

The same play works here.

What I actually think happens next

Let me pull this together into what I actually believe, having watched all of it, based on what I know so far:

1. Nobody is fighting about whether to reform anymore. That fight ended 168 to 4. The whole game now is who controls 4 words: “duplication,” “completed,” “inactive,” and “norm-setting.” Those words become criteria. Criteria become lists. Lists become dead mandates. Everything every country has done since April is positioning around those words.
   

2. The blocs that held together for the resolution fight are scrambling for the implementation fight. Egypt sounds like Australia now. Russia quotes Palau. India is more pro-merger than Canada. Knowing which bloc a country belongs to tells you less than it did in March. Knowing where they stand on each specific question tells you more. That’s a real change in how you have to work the room.
   

3. I’ve said it twice already but I’m saying it again because it’s the most important thing in this piece: the Fifth Committee and the reform room are one game played by the same people in different costumes. China votes yes in the General Assembly and cuts at the Fifth Committee. The US preaches discipline while holding the system’s wallet hostage. Read both rooms or you’re reading nothing.
   

4. Human rights mandates are protected on paper and exposed in practice. The formal exclusions cover “foundational” and “structural” mandates, which sounds great, until you notice that Human Rights Council mandates sit fully inside the review, that the human rights office took the deepest budget cut of the UN’s three pillars, and that the slow starvation of secretariats, and you know exactly which secretariat I mean, runs completely underneath this review’s radar. The shield covers the things nobody is currently shooting at. The things being shot at aren’t under the shield.
   

5. A Global South pro-funding coalition is being born, and climate is what’s feeding it. Two years of South Americans breaking ranks, three new members from Africa and Asia, a 40-state warning, a 92-state pledge. It keeps losing and it keeps growing, and in this work, a thing that keeps growing while losing is a thing worth investing in early. Ask anyone who organized anything.
   

6. The new Secretary-General walks in the door in January 2027, and one month before that, in December 2026, the kill list lands: The official review of inactive and duplicative mandates. So a brand-new SG, hunting for early wins to prove they’re serious about reform, gets handed a menu of things to retire in their first 100 days. Whoever shapes that December list shapes what the new SG serves. That’s the whole game in one sentence. Oh and btw, the SG is elected by the 5 Permanent Members of the Security Council, which includes….you know who.

The calendar, screenshot this

That’s 8 months of meetings turned into one map.

And here’s the thing that gets me: None of these countries are hiding any of this. They’re saying their positions out loud, on the record, session after session, betting that nobody’s tracking it.

Track it.

Moderator: Binota Moy Dhamai (Geneva Office of Indigenous Peoples)

Co-organizers

• Geneva Office of Indigenous Peoples

• Land is Life

• Alifuru Council

• Permanent Mission of Guatemala to the United Nations in Geneva

Panelists

• Ghazali Ohorella, Alifuru Council, and legal counsel to the International Indian Treaty Council based in Geneva.

• Sandra Epal-Ratjen, is the UN Representative and Senior Legal Adviser of the International Commission of Jurists.

• Yves Lador, is the representative of Earthjustice to the United Nations in Geneva, focusing on the links between human rights and the environment.

If you’ve ever sat in a UN room, or scrolled a 28-page document someone dropped in the group chat at 9pm the night before you’re supposed to say something, and felt like everyone else already got a memo you never received, this one’s for you. You’re not behind because you’re not smart enough.

You’re behind because nobody handed you the map yet. That’s what this is.

I co-organized a briefing on the penultimate day of EMRIP with two people I trust, Sandra from the International Commission of Jurists and Yves from Earthjustice, and we tried to give a room full of Indigenous representatives a 360-degree briefing on what’s actually happening to the UN right now. Three of us, close to an hour, and we still didn’t cover it all. That’s how big this is.

Why we even had to organize this

Here’s the actual reason this briefing existed. People kept showing up to me with two ideas already fully formed in their heads.

1. All we have to protect is our three Indigenous mechanisms (the Expert Mechanism, the Special Rapporteur, the Permanent Forum) and everything’s fine.

2. UN80 is basically simple. A budget got cut, some things get merged, you lobby a bit, you move on.

Both of those ideas are wrong, and they’re wrong in a way that gets people hurt.

This is 3D chess, multiple boards stacked on top of each other, where a move on the New York board changes what’s possible on the Geneva board, and neither board tells you that’s what just happened. If you’re only watching your three mechanisms, you’re staring at one square on one board while the other boards are already being rearranged.

Here’s the honest part.

We put this whole thing together the day before, because we wanted information out there before people flew home from EMRIP. We asked the Permanent Mission of Guatemala to the UN in Geneva to help secure us a room on that kind of notice, and they came through. It never made it onto the official program.

Our outreach was mostly general, fast, whoever we could reach in time, and I’ll own that I could have done a better job getting the word out. Not everyone who needed to hear this got the invite in time.

That’s exactly why I recorded it and I’m writing this up. So the people who couldn’t be in that room get the same information anyway, and so anyone who was there can go back, check it against what actually got said, and catch anything I got wrong.

So let’s walk through everything we actually said. Because most people are getting this completely wrong, and the details are exactly where they’re getting it wrong.

Download the powerpoint

We opened with the USA, and we should have

Before any of us spoke, we showed a short clip: Mike Waltz, the US Ambassador to the UN, on The Shawn Ryan Show, describing the cause of the UN reform. Cutting 2,600 international bureaucrats. Cutting 25% of peacekeepers. An 18% budget cut, the first real one in the UN’s history (according to him). Withholding a quarter of US funding until reforms happen.

And then the line that mattered most: Get back to basics, stop wars, keep the peace, and “stop all this gender, climate, all this other nonsense.”

That’s not background noise. That’s the thesis for everything that happened to date.

Quick refresher, because you actually need this

Real quick, because you can’t understand what’s being threatened if you don’t understand what exists.

1945: the UN Charter. Founding document. Created the General Assembly, the Security Council, the Economic and Social Council, the Trusteeship Council (basically irrelevant now), the International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat. 1948: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational text everything else hangs off of.

In 2006, the old Commission on Human Rights got upgraded into the Human Rights Council and moved directly under the General Assembly instead of sitting under the Economic and Social Council.

That mattered, because the General Assembly is one country, one vote. It’s the most democratic room in the building. The Security Council works differently: a handful of countries hold veto power and can block anything.

That’s part of why so much is happening in Geneva right now. A lot of the organs in New York are flat-out paralyzed, including by the US position you just heard in that video.

And underneath all of it sits the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, OHCHR, which is the administrative arm, the Secretariat, that actually staffs and runs the mandates and mechanisms the Human Rights Council creates.

There are supposedly three pillars holding the whole institution up: Development, peace and security, and human rights. Officially equal footing. In practice, human rights has always gotten one to three percent of the total UN budget. Always the smallest. Always the afterthought.

Anniversaries are supposed to be progress, watch what they actually become

Here’s something Sandra flagged that I want you to remember every time you see a big celebratory UN moment:

Anniversaries are supposed to be when you lock in progress. Sometimes they are. More often lately, they’ve become the opening for regression.

The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had exactly this problem. Big celebratory events, and then messages from certain states running directly counter to where human rights, including Indigenous rights, were supposed to be heading, backward, dressed up in ceremony.

The “Summit of the Future” and the “Pact of the Future” got the same treatment. Nobody in that room could tell you what was actually futuristic about either one. Most of the energy went into trying to rescue what already exists, not build anything new.

UN80, the mess we were briefing on, was supposed to be the UN’s 80th anniversary moment. Instead, in Sandra’s words, it’s a clear contraction of the system. Not her opinion alone. Shared by myself and a lot of people, and we don’t usually agree on much.

5 processes, stacked on top of each other

This is the part people miss the most, and it’s the part that makes this genuinely hard to track even for people who do this full time.

You’ve got the Human Rights Council’s own efficiency and rationalization process, which has been grinding on for years already.

You’ve got the Council’s 20th anniversary landing this same year, triggering its own review conversation.

You’ve got a separate OHCHR reform track, internally branded “HR 2.0, fit for the future,” where special procedures, like the Special Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, are being folded into general thematic teams instead of standing on their own.

You’ve got a new UN Secretary-General being selected at the end of this year, taking office January 2027, which will reshape the whole vision going forward.

And underneath every single one of those, you’ve got a genuine liquidity crisis forcing cost-cutting across the board.

Five processes. Same year. All touching the same underfunded pillar. Anyone telling you this is simple is trying to sell you something.

The 3 workstreams, and the one that matters

UN80 itself launched in March 2025, ordered by the Secretary-General, split into three workstreams.

Workstream one: Identify efficiencies and improvements. Translation: figure out what can get cut. As an objective, fine, nobody argues with wanting efficiency. The fight is over how it’s being done and in what context.

Workstream two: Review the mandates. This is the one that actually matters, and here’s why. A “mandate” isn’t one thing. It can be a single report. It can be a panel discussion. It can be a full permanent mechanism, like the ones investigating atrocity crimes in Sudan, Myanmar, or Syria. All of it gets filed under the same word.

Workstream three: The paradigm shift. What’s the vision. What structural changes are we actually going for.

Sandra’s read on workstream two, and I agree with her completely: It accidentally exposed something States didn’t understand about their own organization. When you vote for a resolution creating a mandate, most delegations had no real idea how that language gets translated by the Secretariat into actual budget lines and staffing.

Workstream two gave a whole generation of diplomats a crash course in how their own votes turn into money, or don’t.

The math that should make you angry

In the 2026 cuts, the pillar that already gets almost nothing got cut the hardest. 15%, compared to 12% for development and 13% for peace and security.

Sit with that for a moment.

You take the smallest slice of the pie, 1-3% of the whole budget, and you cut that slice harder than the bigger slices next to it. Sandra put it plainly: Cutting 15% of 1% isn’t going to rescue the organization’s finances. It’s not a rescue. It’s a signal about what this institution actually protects when money gets tight, and what it lets go first.

What actually came out of the vision

After all those consultations, workstream three’s big output was the creation of a “Human Rights Group,” meant to mainstream human rights across the system.

Meanwhile, in parallel, mergers were already happening on the ground: UNFPA and UN Women are about to be folded together, UN University and UNITAR already combined, and a special procedure on trafficking merged with one on slavery so that a single person now covers what used to be two distinct mandates.

Sandra’s line resonates: When you merge things while you’re in a financial crisis, you’re not being visionary. You’re not investing in anything that makes the system genuinely more efficient. You’re just trying to make the books look okay with whatever money is left.

Naming this correctly matters

Everyone, every official statement, every headline, calls this a budget crisis. That’s half true. A budget crisis means there’s less money than there used to be. That part is real.

The bigger truth is this: The decisions about where that smaller pot of money goes are political decisions, dressed up as accounting. Every choice about which mandate survives, which mechanism gets merged, which report gets cut, decides whose rights get defended this year and whose don’t. Less a spreadsheet problem, more a values problem wearing a spreadsheet’s clothes.

Call it what it is.

The word you use decides whether people show up angry or show up compliant.

The spreadsheet mentality is the whole story

There are something like 40.000 mandates across the UN system. 40k. When States finally sat down to negotiate the mandate-review resolution this March (Resolution 80/251, which IITC, ICJ, ISHR and Earthjustice all worked to shape toward being predictable and transparent), a lot of delegations were seeing the real scale of that for the first time.

Here’s what that looks like from the inside:

A member state opens something closer to a spreadsheet. How many mandates do Indigenous Peoples have? Eight. How many dedicated mechanisms? Three. Women, people of African descent, other groups: how many do they have?

Then someone says: That seems like a lot. Let’s start reducing.

Nobody in that conversation is asking whether the mandate is working, whether it’s protecting anyone, whether cutting it creates a gap nothing else fills. They’re doing a headcount. A headcount is not a protection assessment. It never has been, and treating it like one is exactly how you end up cutting the thing that was actually working.

This is already hitting people

The Special Rapporteur’s office is receiving somewhere around 11 communications a day right now, with a reduced Secretariat and reduced funding to process them. Country visits are getting cut. That’s slower processing on real human rights violations, fewer eyes on the ground, less access to justice for the people those mandates exist to protect. The mechanisms are under attack, sure. But watch the ability to protect you quietly shrink underneath them, communication by communication.

The overlap trap

Here’s a specific one worth understanding, because it’s exactly how “efficiency” arguments get weaponized.

The Expert Mechanism does country engagement. The Special Rapporteur does country visits. Say both happen to visit Brazil in the same year. A state looking at a spreadsheet sees that and thinks: duplication, cut one.

They are not doing the same job.

But if the mechanisms themselves don’t take responsibility for clearly defining their own distinct lanes, that overlap becomes the easiest excuse in the room for merging or eliminating one of them. This is on us as much as it’s on the States. If we don’t define the boundaries, someone else will define them for us, badly.

The Fifth Committee trick

Here’s the part almost nobody outside in the movement understands, and it’s the actual mechanism killing progress quietly, without a single country ever voting no in public.

Let’s say. The Human Rights Council adopts something. A country votes yes, in Geneva. That same country’s delegation shows up at the Fifth Committee in New York, the one that actually controls the money, and votes against funding it. Same government. Two different rooms. Two different answers.

But before it even gets to that political fight in the Fifth Committee, it passes through a body most people in this movement have never heard of: The Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, ACABQ.

ACABQ reviews the Secretary-General’s budget proposals before they ever reach the Fifth Committee. Its recommendations shape the posts, the non-post resources, the travel budgets, the conference servicing, the actual implementation capacity behind a mandate. Which means the real reductions can already be locked in technically, quietly, before the political debate even starts.

So by the time States are standing up in the Fifth Committee having their big public fight over funding, the room that actually shaped the numbers already met, and you probably weren’t in it. You’ve got a “yes” in Geneva, a technical body upstream deciding what that “yes” can afford, and a political fight in New York over what’s left after that. Three boards. Nobody can be pointed to as the villain.

Geneva says one thing, New York does the opposite

Yves nailed this one.

A country can walk into Geneva and say all the right things on climate, on human rights, whatever the topic is. That same country shows up to the actual climate negotiations somewhere else and says nothing. Different ministry. Different instructions. Different incentives, sometimes literally a different part of that government that doesn’t talk to the part that showed up in Geneva.

Part of why: Geneva runs specialized. Labor issues go to ILO. Health goes to WHO. Even human rights mechanisms under the General Assembly process stay specialized. New York doesn’t work that way. Everything gets discussed and traded inside one large, mixed political process, where a position on Indigenous rights can get quietly swapped for something completely unrelated.

Yves’s team has started literally engineering physical meetings between delegations from the same country but different ministries: Bringing a Human Rights Council delegation and a Basel Convention delegation into the same room during overlapping sessions, on purpose, so the follow-through has a chance of actually happening.

It worked at least once already. That kind of cross-ministry meeting helped revive ownership, from the African Group specifically, over the Resolution on Toxics and Human Rights, a resolution the African Group originally launched but had started to lose the thread on internally.

How you can bury something without a funeral

This is the part that should worry you most, and it’s the part nobody’s shouting about.

“Mainstreaming”, it sounds good.

It sounds like inclusion: The issue becomes everyone’s job instead of one office’s job. We’ve watched this movie already. When gender issues got mainstreamed across the system, dedicated capacity got folded into general thematic teams, and the sharp edge that used to exist got sanded down into a paragraph in everyone’s mandate and nobody’s actual priority.

Now there’s a new “Human Rights Group” being proposed as the big vision output of all this. Beautiful language from the top. But history is clear here: Once you mainstream an issue, you’ve usually started the process of making sure nobody owns it anymore. Yves said it flat out on the panel: That’s exactly why the Human Rights Group idea worries him, despite the nice words attached to it.

There’s a related fight happening over the word “mandate” itself. The UN80 mandate review covers General Assembly mandates broadly, far more than just human rights ones. Indigenous Peoples and civil society are pushing hard to make sure Human Rights Council mandates specifically get reviewed by the Human Rights Council, under protection-based criteria, not folded into some larger, vaguer General Assembly bucket where the specific reasoning gets lost.

The PFII is the blueprint for how this actually works

Next year, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issue likely won’t have a secretariat anymore. It stays alive on paper. What actually happens underneath that: Dissolved onto an ad hoc basis, no head of secretariat, the dedicated staff moved off the section entirely. No one holding the thread between sessions, or pushing recommendations into the Third Committee, keeping continuity alive for twelve months at a stretch.

It still technically exists.

It just won’t be able to do much of anything between meetings. And once something can’t do anything, it becomes very easy for the next round of cuts to say: Well, this one isn’t really doing much anymore, is it? Let’s merge it with the Expert Mechanism, maybe alternate it Geneva one year, New York the next, the way the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent is organized. All of this is already being floated informally.

Nothing dramatic about that. It’s a slow leak, and slow leaks are much harder to build a movement around than a dramatic vote to shut something down, because there’s no single moment to rally against.

Four blocs, and you need to know which is which

Here’s the most exhausting part. Watching the informal dialogues held in NYC after you’ve had a long day in Geneva. Track it all and you’ll see a pattern showing up clearly enough to name roughly four blocs. One aligned with the US on the necessity of reform and contraction. One, often EU-adjacent, wanting efficiency but within guardrails. Some smaller state groupings pushing higher ambition on rights while still wanting fiscal discipline. And a mixed remainder without a consistent position yet.

Before you go asking “who are the friendly states,” know which bloc you’re actually talking to and what they’re optimizing for. Treating all four as one undifferentiated audience is how you waste a meeting.

Being pitted against each other is the tactic

Some member states have now asked civil society and Indigenous representatives, twice, a version of this question: If you want the three Indigenous human rights mechanisms to survive, what are you willing to sacrifice? Meaning: Which other group, women’s rights, gender, another constituency, should lose instead.

Framed as budget, sure.

What it actually does is put constituencies in competition with each other, so nobody notices the total pool of protection keeps shrinking regardless of who wins the internal fight. Refuse to play. Don’t pick who loses.

Why access to New York still matters

One more detail worth keeping:

The Special Rapporteur on the right to a healthy and sustainable environment has specifically pushed to keep special procedures able to travel to New York, even though the connection between Geneva expertise and New York’s actual decision-makers is, by Yves’s own description, “far from being great” as it currently works.

It’s still one of the only ways to get people who sit in New York rooms to understand what’s actually being built in Geneva rooms. Losing that travel access wouldn’t show up as a headline. It would just quietly widen the exact Geneva-New York gap this whole briefing was about.

The one piece of actual good news

Hold onto this one, because it proves organizing still works even when the whole system feels rigged against you.

There was a genuinely dumb rule: If a country’s contribution to the UN wasn’t spent by year-end, it had to be returned. So certain countries (Sandra named China specifically, though she was clear they weren’t the only ones) would wire the money on December 27th, guaranteeing it couldn’t possibly be used in time, purely to get it off their books before the deadline. Civil society, Indigenous Peoples incl. IITC, the International Service for Human Rights, and some friendly states pushed together and got that rule reversed.

Small. Administrative. Not glamorous at all. And it matters, because it’s proof that even inside a system this heavy, organized pressure moves something. That’s the whole game, right there, in miniature.

What to actually do with this before your next meeting

Reading this once isn’t the win. Using it once is. So here’s the short version you can screenshot:

You don’t need to understand all 40.000 mandates. You need to know which board you’re playing on before you make your next move.

Protect the foundation first, then everything else follows

If I had to leave you with one thing from this briefing, it’s this: Protect the human rights pillar first. Not the mechanisms. Not the mandates. The foundation underneath all of it.

Here’s the truth.

You can save a mechanism, keep the Expert Mechanism alive, keep a Special Rapporteur’s mandate renewed, and still lose, if the pillar underneath them gets gutted so badly those mechanisms have nothing left to plug into. A mechanism with no functioning secretariat, no budget, and no connective tissue to the rest of the UN system isn’t protection. It’s a name on a website.

Protect the foundation. Then the mandates. Then the specific mechanisms. In that order.

Anyone telling you to fight for the mechanisms first is fighting for the visible part instead of the part actually holding everything up. Treat any contraction happening right now as temporary. Don’t accept it as the new normal, even while we adapt to it.

They will keep telling you this is about money. It’s about whose protection survives the next round of cuts, and whether you showed up before that decision got made, or after.

• A colleague looked at me and said: the moment you stop traveling it’s great, the moment you start traveling more we’re in trouble. I explain what she meant and why it landed the way it did.

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• At the formal briefing I shared what I could say publicly. At the late dinner with five people I shared what I held back. I explain what that was and why it only works at a small table.

• My mom tracked the war in Maluku from our house every morning. Calls to all the islands, pen and paper, confirming events through multiple sources. That …

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• The caucus on Sunday had six co-chairs and a vote for who delivers the opening invocation. I explain what a caucus is for and what the dysfunction exposed as data.

• On UN80, most jumped straight to protecting the three Indigenous mechanisms. Wrong order. Protect the human rights pillar first. Protect the mandates second. The mechanisms fo…

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Tabea, happy Saturday,

I had a conversation with a colleague last week at Concordia, and I keep having versions of this same conversation, so figured I’d write it out.

Someone she barely knows had posted something about her online, accusing her of one thing or another. She showed me the message. It got to her. It always does.

That’s the thing about messages like that. You read them once and they’re in your head for the rest of the day. Should I respond? Is there some truth to this? Do other people believe it? If I say nothing, will that look like guilt? Before you know it, a stranger has taken over your morning.

I told her what took me way too long to figure out:

If you let criticism from anyone, about anything, get to you, eventually you won’t want to get out of bed.

People love saying “don’t take it as criticism, take it as feedback.” I think that’s a bunch of BS. Not everything is feedback. Calling it that just means every random opinion deserves a spot in your head, gets processed, gets stored somewhere.

It doesn’t.

Processing criticism costs something from you. Attention, time, energy. Even when you land on “this is nonsense,” you already paid.

You replayed it. Questioned yourself. Talked about it with someone. Maybe drafted a reply you never sent. Maybe lost some sleep over it.

Meanwhile the person who wrote it paid almost nothing. Three sentences in a Signal group, hit send, move on. You’re the one who spent hours defending yourself against something that cost them 30 seconds. Bad trade.

Believe me, over the years I’ve been called a CIA agent. FBI. KGB. Once, an “agent of genocide.” At some point you have to be impressed by the international range.

But those accusations taught me something: It’s incredibly cheap to say almost anything about someone when there’s no cost to saying it. Post it in a group chat, fire it off to a listserv, type it from the sidelines with zero skin in the game. And I wonder, honestly, how many of those people would say the same thing to my face. No screen, no audience, no reply-all. Probably not many.

I tried everything over the years. Responding. Explaining. Trying to prove people wrong. Being diplomatic. Digging for the hidden lesson in every attack. That last one? It sounds mature but can quietly hollow you out, because a lot of criticism isn’t really about your work.

Sometimes it’s envy.
Sometimes people hate that you’re doing the thing they’re not.
Sometimes your pace makes them feel small.
Sometimes people just like bitching about someone.

So I made a rule.

I only take criticism seriously from people operating at my level or above. That’s it. No investigation, no searching for buried wisdom. Same level or higher? I listen. Not? See ya.

And I know what my level is.

First 6,5 months of this year, I tracked 29 UN meetings and processes. 14 meetings tied to the UN80 initiative. 15 formal negotiation sessions. Just under 100 working days on this, and that’s undercounting it, since some days meant two or three overlapping meetings running at once, in rooms most people will never see or hear about.

That’s my level. Not my title, not my follower count. The work, the pace, the responsibility.

When someone operating at that level criticises me, I pay attention. They know what the job costs. Everyone else is free to have an opinion. I’m equally free to skip it.

On that note, I met a funder during EMRIP who’d never spoken to me before, just seen my work from a distance, at side events, on LinkedIn, in videos and wanted to meet me while she was at EMRIP. First thing she said: “I like your integrity.” After 10 minutes, something like, “whatever you’re building, I know you’ll make it happen, how can we help?” That landed. Not because it was flattering, but because it meant someone watched from a distance and saw the pattern: I say something, then I try do it.

She also warned me. As your influence grows, people try to influence you back. Some offer opportunities, some apply pressure, some ask for small compromises that feel harmless in the moment. Fall below your own standard once, and climbing back is harder than it looks.

That was a nice conversation. And no, I didn’t ask for money. I asked them for something else in phase 1 of what we’re building.

Before you go

One warning about this rule though: It's easy to mix up someone who isn't at your level with someone who just hasn't earned their badge yet. Those are two different problems.

Someone with fewer followers can still operate at a serious level. Someone younger can carry real weight. The filter isn't about status. It's about whether someone's actually done the work they're critiquing.

Don't turn the filter into arrogance, and don't turn humility into permanent availability either.

Not every accusation owes your attention.

Listen to people who've made the miles. Let the rest keep typing.

That’s it for today.

See you next week!

• Why the US funding freeze happened, straight from the US Ambassador to the UN, what reform actually means from their side, and why 2026 is a survival year, not an ambition year.

• Why “three UN mandates on Indigenous issues” is a myth. There are far more, and Workstream 2 of UN80 is where mandate implementation review is actually happening.

• The three ways mandates get quietly retired: Formal retirement, procedural dilution (annual reports becoming biennial, etc.), and operational starvation (secretariats hollowed out while the meeting itself survives).

• What Resolution 80/251 actually secured for Indigenous Peoples and civil society, and what the ad hoc working group’s first internal deadline (August 2026) does and doesn’t mean.

• The member state map: who’s pushing efficiency (US, and a bloc around it), who’s cautioning protection, and where the real swing votes sit.

• The trickle-down risk: Protect the human rights pillar first, or the mandates go, and then the mechanisms.

Want the complete playbook?

Tabea, happy Saturday.

The Committee on World Food Security session had just wrapped in Rome, and it was a long one. By evening it was still stupid hot outside FAO headquarters.

But, there’s a street right outside with a row of cafes, so a few of us walked out and sat down to unwind. Conversation drifted between English and French, nothing serious, just people decompressing after a hard week.

Then one of the farmer representatives at the table said, almost as an afterthought, “Yeah, by the way, those negotiating texts on the screen. I still have a hard time with them.”

I told them that’s completely normal. If you’re a farmer, you didn’t go to diplomacy school, and nobody should expect you to read a wall of brackets like it’s second nature.

They seemed relieved that I’d been there earlier in the week to help untangle some of that language. Then they asked me straight up, which negotiation course or training should they take?

That question is where this whole answer started.

Why negotiation training doesn’t help

My answer surprised them. Most negotiation training won’t prepare you for a textual negotiation. It’ll teach you how to prepare: Interests, positions, leverage, trust, maybe body language, your best alternative to a deal. All of that has real value. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s worthless.

But then you walk into a United Nations negotiation. A paragraph goes up on a big screen. It’s full of brackets.

Imagine this. Five States want five different versions of the same sentence. One wants to delete half of it. Another adds “as appropriate.” A third adds “in accordance with national circumstances.” A fourth wants to swap “shall” for “should.” The secretariat is typing changes faster than the chair can explain what just happened.

Then the chair looks at you and gives you the floor. You’ve got seconds. That’s the exact moment your training stops helping.

I still remember the first time this happened to me. Paris, then Bonn, then Poland not long after. I walked in with our statement printed, folder tucked under my arm, feeling ready. Then the paragraph went up on the screen and it looked nothing like the version I had prepared for. Half of it was struck through. New phrases were stacked on top of each other in brackets, three or four options fighting for the same spot in the sentence.

I sat there trying to work out what each new word was actually doing. Trying to remember which State had proposed which change, because that tells you who to talk to later. Trying to hold on to our position while also deciding whether to raise my hand. My statement was ready. But, it felt useless already.

I had a statement. A good one. We’d sat with our caucus before the session, talked through what mattered, agreed on the values we were defending. It said Indigenous Peoples must be included. It said our rights must be respected. It laid out what our people were actually facing on the ground. Every word of it was true.

Then the co-facilitator turned to me and asked a simple question. “What exact text are you proposing?”

I didn’t have an answer. Not a real one. I could tell you the principle. I could tell you exactly what our people were facing. But point to the paragraph and say which words come out, which words go in, and what the new sentence should actually read? I couldn’t do it on the spot. Nobody warns you about that gap. You just find it, standing there with a statement in your hand and nothing useful left to say.

That’s the part that still gets me, to be honest. The statement itself wasn’t wrong. It answered a version of the paragraph that no longer existed by the time I got the floor.

Your brain when the screen fills with brackets

Here’s what’s happening in the room while all this is going on.

You’re reading the paragraph. You’re listening to whoever’s speaking. You’re watching the secretariat delete a word and add three more in real time. You’re trying to remember your own instructions from your traditional council back home. You’re guessing whether the new change helps you or hurts you.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, the person next to you leans over and whispers, “What do you think?” Your WhatsApp chat blows up.

Your brain can’t hold all of that at once. Nobody’s can. Working memory has limits, and this format hits every single one of them at the same time. You reread the same line three times. You catch one change and miss the next. You look around for someone, anyone, to tell you what to do. And because your prepared statement is the one thing in your hands that still feels solid, you read it anyway.

Meanwhile the room has already moved on.

A State may have already added the exact idea you wanted, or another one may have quietly gutted it while you were still catching up. The whole room might now be fighting over one phrase, or one comma. Your statement can be completely true and still be useless, because you’re answering last week’s text while the room is writing this week’s.

What is a shadow paragraph?

Here’s the shift that actually fixed this for me.

Most people prepare by asking what they want to say. An Indigenous diplomat asks a different question. What do we want this paragraph to become? That second question is the one that changes outcomes.

I call the tool a shadow paragraph.

Take the paragraph in front of you and write the version you’d want if your people held the pen. The actual sentence, not just the principle behind it.

• Where should “Indigenous Peoples” show up in the text?

• Does it name UNDRIP, or human rights, or international standards?

• Does it protect a right, or does it quietly hand that right over to national law?

• What happens to the sentence if someone slips in “as appropriate”?

• Does it still do its job?

How to triage a negotiating text

You can’t write a shadow paragraph for every line in a long negotiating text, and honestly, you shouldn’t try.

I’m guessing you have a small delegation, and a small one doesn’t have the people or the hours for that. So I suggest you triage. Like in a hospital.

• Some paragraphs touch your rights, your lands, your knowledge, your safety directly, and those you defend with everything you have.

• Some would be nice to improve but aren’t the real fight.

• And some you can live with in almost any form.

It’s just math when you only get one or two shots at the floor. In most rooms you get called on once, maybe twice, so you spend that floor time where it actually counts.

FAO’s Committee on World Food Security gives Indigenous Peoples more room to speak than most spaces do, but even there you still have to watch the wording closely. You can’t fight every bracket. You have to know which ones are worth the fight.

For the paragraphs that matter most, I write three versions.

• The ideal text, the one that says exactly what I need.

• The fallback, weaker but still doing the job.

• And the red line, the lowest point I’ll accept.

For Indigenous Peoples, that red line should never sit below UNDRIP. Not negotiable.

Why “as appropriate” can quietly gut a right

This is also why little words like “as appropriate” or “where applicable” matter way more than they sound like they should. The first time you see one, it reads as harmless filler.

Once you’ve watched a State add one on purpose, you start asking real questions.

• Who decides what counts as appropriate?

• Who decides when the right applies?

• What happens when national law is weaker than the standard everyone already agreed to?

Once you know exactly what your paragraph needs to do, and what it must never do, those questions get a lot easier to answer fast.

Why your comparison text should be gospel

The last piece is your comparison text. A past resolution, an agreed decision, a treaty article, language straight from UNDRIP. Know it like gospel. The old text wasn’t perfect. But you need that baseline to tell whether a new proposal is a real compromise or a quiet step backward dressed up as one.

I still feel the overload, by the way.

I felt it again recently reading the draft legally binding instrument on business and human rights, which is its own soup of brackets and competing language.

Experience doesn’t make that feeling go away. It just gives you a method for it. I walk in already knowing the job of the paragraph, carrying the baseline, holding my ideal version, my fallback, and my red line.

Don’t get me wrong. Prepared statements still matter.

They frame the issue, remind the room what’s at stake, and carry the voices from the ground into a cold meeting room. But a statement tells the room what you believe. A shadow paragraph tells the room what you want it to adopt. Sometimes the whole fight comes down to one word, or one comma, and a good statement isn’t going to save you there.

Prepare your statement. Then go further and prepare the paragraph. Prepare the fallback. Prepare the red line. Know what the text must do and what it must never do.

Carry your comparison text like gospel.

Before you go

The mistake I see most often happens the weekend before.

A team sits down, goes through the whole text together, writes down the version they want, and treats it as gospel. I have done this myself. It feels like preparation. It actually makes you rigid.

The room moves, a co-chair floats a landing zone, another delegation swaps one word, and now your fixed text does not fit anymore. Have the shadow paragraph, yes. But have the bandwidth around it too, the ideal, the fallback, the red line, so you can move inside that range instead of freezing the moment the target shifts.

The other thing people forget is that a paragraph never sits alone.

We stare at what is on the screen and read it in isolation, when the real skill is holding the whole document in your head at once.

If section 1, paragraph 1D changes, does that touch section 3, paragraph 2C?

A pro move is putting a note in the margin of your own document: If this changes to that, here is what it does over there. Keep an eye on the big picture, not just the bracket in front of you.

That’s it for today.

See you next week.

• 40% of paragraphs covered after five days. Text all yellow. Nothing resolved on Indigenous Peoples. I explain what happens next and why going back to capital for new instructions can go both ways.

• The shadow paragraph technique: your ideal paragraph on one side, your minimum acceptable formulation on the other, your bottom line below whi…

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• When someone takes the floor I don’t look at them. I look at the room. Who nods. Who turns to face you directly instead of watching the screen. I explain how to tell a genuine nod from a counterfeit one.

• Going into a bilateral with a position paper and asking for support is applying for a job and hoping for the best. I explain the mindse…

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• Not all language sources are equal. I ranked them from weakest to strongest: your own drafting at the bottom, GA resolutions at the top. The scavenger hunt for language that survives the room is a skill most people never get taught.

• Someone proposed G20 language in a food security text. Then WTO language. Then a Security Council resoluti…

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• I mapped the participation ladder across every major UN body. Most Indigenous peoples treat every room the same. They should not.

• FAO CFS is the one room where Indigenous Peoples can bracket text, go back and forth with member states, and intervene multiple times. I explain exactly how that works in practice.

• Human rights language was dro…

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Tabea, happy Saturday,

So……I have a weird confession to make.

I can get very interested in procedural rules.

I can completely nerd out on Rules of Procedure.

Not because procedure is beautiful. Most of the time, it is not. It is dry, slow, full of acronyms and sentences that sound like they were written by someone who lost a bet.

But procedure tells me something important. It tells you how power actually moves.

A special session doesn’t always happen

This week, I was following a Human Rights Council discussion on special sessions. What struck me is that they don’t happen simply because something terrible is happening in the world.

Iran, Palestine, just to name a few.

A crisis can be real, the evidence clear, and still the Council does not move on its own.

There is a mechanism. A member has to initiate the request. Then a third of the 47 members have to support it. 16 states. One moves first. 15 follow.

Then the machinery turns on.

Most people miss this part, because they experience the UN through the visible moments: the speech, the vote, the final text. So they assume the work is the statement.

Why the statement matters anyway

I get why.

Especially for Indigenous Peoples, statements are not just technical documents. They carry memory, grief, land, ancestors. They carry the frustration of explaining, again, that we are Peoples, not stakeholders, not communities to be managed.

Statements matter. A good one protects a record and makes it harder for a process to pretend we were silent.

But, a statement is not always the work. By the time you write it, the real work has often already happened somewhere else. The work is figuring out where and when the decision becomes a decision.

The questions nobody asks

Once you understand that, you stop looking only at the final session. You start asking what happened before it.

• Who asked for the meeting?

• Who is in the informal, and who is outside it?

• Who has the pen?

• Who needs political cover before they will say yes in public?

That last question matters most, because every process has a moment when a decision is still soft. Before the text hardens. Before a chair says, “I sense there is no appetite to reopen this paragraph.”

That is the window.

Sometimes it is a corridor, a WhatsApp message, someone saying “send me the language.” By the time the formal meeting begins, the window is often half closed.

The statement is one tool. Mistake it for the whole strategy, and you keep arriving at the station after the train has left.

The furniture trap

Imagine this. A draft comes out.

Indigenous Peoples are missing, or folded into “Indigenous Peoples and local communities” as if that costs nothing. FPIC gets softened into consultation. You try to mobilize people, you scramble: strong interventions, circulated language, reports of the Special Rapporteur, or the joint-statement of the 3 UN mechanisms working on Indigenous rights.

Necessary. But also, late.

Like fixing your house’s foundations after the roof is on. We are asked for comments on the furniture. But the house has already been built.

This is why I think the biggest shift Indigenous advocacy needs is moving from statement advocacy to architecture advocacy.

Statement advocacy asks, “What do we need to say?”
Architecture advocacy asks, “Where does this decision actually get shaped?”

Different question, different behavior.

The second moves attention upstream: is there a zero draft, and who writes it? Which states are nervous, and which agree with us but need language they can defend?

This is unglamorous work. It rarely gets quoted, and it decides whether the quote matters.

What influence actually looks like

More often than not, influence looks boring. Sending a paragraph at 11:42 p.m. Giving a delegation three options: Ideal language, acceptable language, minimum red line.

A perfect paragraph nobody can carry is not a strategy. It is a document. A delegate may agree with you but have no instructions. A friendly state may like your language but fear reopening a paragraph.

Advocacy is about making the right thing movable. Being right alone doesn’t cut it.

Sometimes states act in bad faith. But sometimes the problem is simpler and more frustrating. The right language arrived too late. The wrong person received it. The process had already moved on.

So get better at reading the room before it becomes visible.

Present, but not positioned

Our participation is often treated as a symbolic add-on: present, but not positioned, heard but not able to shape. Registration categories, speaking order, access to informals: these look procedural. They are political.

The next phase of Indigenous advocacy should be about better positioning: engaging before the text is fully formed, building relationships before we need them, and preparing language others can use.

That is why this work is hard to teach. Timing matters as much as law. Judgment matters as much as principle.

Once you stop seeing the UN as one big room and start seeing it as a set of moving parts, you stop feeling like everything depends on one speech. A meeting that looks boring may be the place where the future text is being prepared.

Call it agency, not cynicism.

Before you go

The lesson is simpler than “the system is bad” or “statements are pointless.” Do not mistake the visible part of the work for the whole work.

Before the next statement, ask different questions.

Is the text still movable? What do the people who can move it need from us: exact language, political cover, a red line?

It’s about making the ask travel. A right that cannot travel through the process remains a right on paper. Indigenous Peoples have had enough of those.

The work is everything that makes the statement land: the relationship that gets it read, the timing that makes it useful, the language that makes it carryable. I want us to be earlier. Better positioned. Understanding the machinery well enough to use it, challenge it, and redesign it when necessary.

Say the right thing. Then get it into the place where decisions are still possible.

That’s it for this week.

See you next Saturday.

• A Security Council ambassador confirmed in two words what I had felt for years but could not name. The pre-COVID UN is gone and the movement is still negotiating as if it is 2007.

• Member states stopped fighting in one room. They are building spin-off groups and micro coalitions that feed into each other. If you are not in those rooms you…

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• Panama is developing a universal declaration on the rights of nature. Bolivia and New Zealand already have versions in law. Nobody is asking the obvious question: who speaks on behalf of the whale when the Inuit have the right to hunt one?

• The International Law Commission briefed today on something most Indigenous peoples miss: HRC resol…

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• The UN just launched a transcript website for its public meetings. It looks like transparency. It is AI infrastructure. LLMs need structured text at scale. That is what the UN just built.

• A member state can vote yes on a resolution in Geneva and kill the funding for it at the Fifth Committee in New York. Two separate bodies. No contradic…

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• I was sick all last week. My body waited for the tabling deadline to pass and then collapsed. This brief covers everything I missed and everything that happened today.

• What most Indigenous Peoples do in UN processes is reply to texts and fight conflation. Necessary. But not enough. In BBNJ we are doing something different.

• Conflation show…

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