UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer joined i24 News with Nicole Zedeck to share UN Watch’s latest report exposing how UN “experts” accepted significant funding from China, Russia, and Qatar before attacking the U.S., Israel, and the West. Neuer also reacted to the UN placing Israel on the sexual violence blacklist alongside Hamas.
Nicole Zedeck: You have a new report and it states UN experts they’re accepting funding from China, Russia, Qatar pushing these countries’ interests. Can you just tell me what some of your findings are?
Hillel Neuer: Look, it’s numerous of the so-called UN human rights experts who get quoted every day by Reuters, the New York Times and other major media. We found that a number of them are taking money direct funding from China, Russia and Qatar. I’ll give a few examples.
Ben Saul, he’s a law professor at the University of Sydney. According to UN documents in 2024 he received $150,000 from China for his activities. And surprise surprise he’s the expert on counterterrorism. He’s never said a word to condemn China for putting a million Uyghur Muslims into camps in the name of counterterrorism. He hadn’t he hadn’t a word to say about that. Instead, he attacks Israel and America every single day.
There’s another UN expert her name is Alena Douhan. She received $1.3 million from China, Russia and Qatar. And guess what? She wrote reports praising shielding, apologizing for China, Russia and Qatar. She went on a Chinese-organized video saying everything is fine with the Uyghurs. She visited China to say everything is fine with the Uyghurs, blame the West. And she took $1.3 million. We have numerous examples of that. Extreme ideological bias in some cases financial corruption in other cases it’s an ideological extremism with no accountability.
We know the extreme case of Francesca Albanese who’s the de facto spokesperson for Hamas spreads Hamas lies. There’s no accountability. We made complaints. The chair of the UN Committee is himself a human rights expert who himself took $50,000 from China.
Nicole Zedeck: Well, if this is so deeply-rooted into the experts that are so embedded in the United Nations, what can be done if it’s so widespread?
Hillel Neuer: Well, we’ve complained to leading Western governments. In some cases they spoke out. In the case of Francesca Albanese is an exceptional case where France called on her to resign Germany condemned her for antisemitism the Canadian government condemned her for Holocaust inversion, and yet you have leading institutions like the New York Times, three Belgian universities that gave her a doctorate, media that give her a platform without mentioning the fact that she’s been found guilty of antisemitism by so many institutions.
So what we need is for the governments to step up. Our report, available on our website unwatch.org calls on leading Western governments to finally hold them accountable. When anti-American antisemitic rapporteurs are appointed we’re calling on the democracies to speak out not to go along, to get along not to legitimize and endorse them.
We need Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia not only the U.S. to speak out and call out these UN rapporteurs when they are ideologically captured or when they’re financially corrupt. And we need them to hold them to account. And if it means defunding them sanctioning them that’s what we need to see.
Nicole Zedeck: Hillel, what does it mean for Israel to be included in this list? Danny Danon is calling it “blood libel” being placed next to Hamas and other terror groups. But what is the true damage of being on this list?
Hillel Neuer: The damage is severe. The UN has once again descended into moral bankruptcy by placing Israel on a blacklist alongside Hamas. These are the very terrorists who systematically raped and sexually tortured Israeli women and others on October 7 and afterwards against the hostages in Gaza.
So look, this isn’t merely a mistake. This is an obscene inversion of victim and perpetrator. It’s a deliberate inversion of what Hamas did to Israelis. It is another modern blood libel the same kind that the UN rushed to fabricate. The lie that Israel bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in October 2023, the lie about famine in Gaza, the lie that 14,000 children are going to die in 48 hours. This is the same kind of blood libel.
And look, Israel provided them with extensive documentation disproving this latest blood libel. Yet Secretary-General Guterres chose to reward terrorism. The decision strips the UN of any remaining credibility if they had any. And it reveals the extent to which the UN has been captured by those who hate Israel more than they care about rape being used as a weapon of war.
So look, the world needs to treat this blacklist with the contempt it deserves. Democracies need to stop subsidizing this institutionalized antisemitism. History will record this as another shameful chapter in the UN’s long war against the Jewish state.
