SOUTH-EAST ASIA (Bloomberg): The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said his agency has had to scale back its work given the financial crisis at the international peacekeeping body.
Volker Türk conceded that his office is struggling to support global freedoms as much as he would like because his staff have had to make do without a quarter of their prior funding. In 2024, the organization’s total budget was about $440 million. This year, Türk said it is operating with about 25% less.
"We are trying to make sure that we can deliver - at a much lower level - on all of these issues,” Türk said Wednesday in an interview with Bloomberg. "I think the only answer is to get more funding.”
Türk acknowledged that the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are getting the most attention and that "they deserve full spotlight, and they need to be, obviously, resolved urgently.” But he added that other issues require just as much work and have thinner resources, including the crisis in Sudan, civil war in Myanmar, and violence in Haiti.
The OHCHR is the leading UN entity on human rights, working with dozens of countries to address the most pressing human-rights violations both on the ground and by working with governments and other global partners.
Instead of going on 10 country visits in a year, the organization only does two, Türk said. And they’ve had to cut back the number of annual Treaty Body sessions - where countries get to raise different Human Rights issues - to two annually, from three. This means that 35 countries will not be able to bring their concerns under international scrutiny, Türk explained.
These cuts land amid the UN’s full-blown financial crisis, which Antonio Guterres announced in January and which stems from the US withholding billions of dollars owed.
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