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.
All we have to protect is our three Indigenous mechanisms (the Expert Mechanism, the Special Rapporteur, the Permanent Forum) and everything’s fine.
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.
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:
Before you speak on anything UN80-related, ask:
Ask which of the four blocs the delegation in front of you belongs to before you decide what to say to them.
If someone tells you a merger is “efficiency,” ask them directly what it does to protection, not the org chart. Don’t accept “look how efficient we’ve been” as an answer.
If a mandate review shows up in your region’s paperwork, check whether it’s actually a Human Rights Council mandate or a broader General Assembly one, because they’re being reviewed under different rules and getting confused on purpose.
And if anyone (a state, an NGO, another constituency) asks what you’re willing to sacrifice so your mechanisms survive, that’s not a real question. Don’t answer it. Name it out loud instead.
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.
