International USA boycotts UN review of its human rights situation
The USA is the second country after Israel to refuse a UN review of its human rights situation. As expected, the US chairs remained empty at the scheduled meeting of the responsible working group in Geneva.
07.11.2025, 16:38
SDA
The US government had also not submitted a report on the situation in the USA in advance. The working group of the UN Human Rights Council formally noted the "non-cooperation". This has no direct consequences. The working group invited the USA to rejoin the process at a later date.
US President Donald Trump's administration argues that the United Nations (UN) is only feigning concern for human rights while allowing known human rights violators to use the UN to protect themselves from investigation. This compromises the monitoring mechanism, they said when asked.
Review procedure actually applies to all countries
Since 2008, all 193 UN member states have had to undergo this review of their human rights situation approximately every five years. Countries report on their implementation of human rights standards, while other countries can ask questions, raise issues and make recommendations. Germany's last turn came in 2023. The procedure is called the UPR ("universal periodic review").
Israel was the only country to withdraw from a review once, in 2013, but resumed cooperation a few months later.
USA accuses UN Human Rights Council of failure
"Participation in the UPR process would be an endorsement of the mandate and activities of the UN Human Rights Council and would ignore its ongoing failure to condemn the worst human rights violators," the US embassy in Geneva stated. The USA withdrew from the Human Rights Council a few weeks after Trump took office. However, this does not release any country from the agreement to undergo the UPR process.
On behalf of the EU, a diplomat from Cyprus regretted that the USA was not participating in the process. The UPR process is effective because it applies to all countries and this universality must be maintained. Human rights activists fear that autocratically governed states could take the USA as an example and evade the process in the future.
