On 4 February, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the body is at risk of ‘imminent financial collapse’ due to unpaid fees and a budget rule that forces it to return unspent funds. Recent years have also seen major cuts to voluntary funding to UN agencies on the part of a wide range of (especially developed) States. These unpaid fees and funding cuts have disproportionately impacted the UN’s human rights pillar – already the least resourced of the three pillars, traditionally receiving only around 3-4 per cent of the UN regular budget (the security and development pillars each receive between 20 and 25 per cent).
Against this backdrop, in March last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres launched his UN80 reform initiative. The system-wide reform proposals respond to one vital question: how can the UN be more relevant and have greater on-the-ground impact amid tightening resources?
Guterres’ answer to this question is three-fold. First, to make the UN more efficient by rationalising mandates (resolutions, mechanisms, reports, debates, etc.), merging UN entities with overlapping mandates, and discontinuing others, and moving some UN entities to cheaper duty stations. Second, to make the UN more operational and impactful, and thus better able to deliver real change at national level, including by (as per the proposals contained in the September 2025 report ‘Shifting Paradigms: United to Deliver’) ‘improv[ing] timely, demand-driven access to expertise for member States.’ Finally, the UN budget should be amended to reflect the previous two points – with investments focused less on resolutions, reports, and meetings in Geneva or New York, and more on operations at national and local levels, and more on delivering technical assistance and expertise.
Implications for the UN human rights pillar
As noted above, the human rights pillar has always been the UN’s ‘little pillar’ – both in terms of its institutional status and prerogatives, and in terms of its financial position, traditionally receiving 3-4 per cent of the regular budget. From this already low level, the human rights pillar has been disproportionally impacted by funding cuts in 2025 and 2025. For example, during the organisational meeting ahead of the 61st session of the Human Rights Council in February, Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif announced that the approved regular budgetary allocation for OHCHR in 2026 ‘amounts to US$221.19 million, representing a reduction of US$25.28 million compared to the 2025 approved budget (which was US$246.47 million).’
While these figures should be read with certain caveats – for example, not all funding for UN human rights work goes to OHCHR; other agencies and programmes such as UNICEF, UN Women, UNDP, and UNFPA also – and increasingly – support the human rights pillar, especially in terms of country-level implementation and impact – they are nonetheless reflective of a historic underfunding of human rights work at the UN.
However, in addition to acknowledging problems with how much money goes to the human rights pillar, UN80 also impels us to reflect on how and where that money is invested and spent (both regular budget allocations, and extrabudgetary or voluntary contributions to human rights).
At one level this means reflecting on where the money is spent: how much of the funding received by OHCHR each year is used to service the Human Rights Council (OHCHR acts as the body’s secretariat) and implement the various mandates given to it by States (through resolutions), as well as to finance other Geneva-based costs associated with OHCHR’s wider role as a UN agency or programme – such as headquarters staffing and related operational costs; and how much – in comparison – is used to fund activities undertaken by OHCHR’s regional offices, as well as by Human Rights Advisers in-country – activities designed (in the words of UN80) to deliver ‘timely, demand-driven access to expertise for member States’?
At another level, it means reflecting on how the budgetary and extrabudgetary resources allocated to OHCHR/the human rights pillar is spent, which activities and programmes are the focus of investments, and whether those investments are consistent with UN80’s imperative to prioritise activities likely to generate sustainable and measurable impact at national and local levels.
Measuring investments in human rights technical assistance, and capacity-building support
From the foregoing, it is clear that, if UN80 is to succeed in helping to build a leaner, more responsive, and more impactful United Nations, then the human rights pillar must be more adequately and equitably funded, and States at the Human Rights Council, as well as OHCHR, must have an honest and open-minded discussion, based on transparent budgetary information provided by OHCHR, about how the human rights pillar is investing available financial resources at present, and whether and how that should change in order to secure maximum on-the-ground impact in the greatest number of UN member States.
While all parts of the mandate of the Council are equally important, including its mandates to address situations of violations of human rights (operative paragraph 3 of GA resolution 60/251 establishing the body and its mandate) and secure accountability, to serve as a forum for dialogue on thematic issues and shape universal norms (paragraph 5b), and make recommendations for the further development of international law (paragraph 5c), over a decade of Universal Rights Group research shows that its greatest potential for impact, in the greatest number of countries, and thus benefiting the greatest number of rights-holders, lies with paragraphs 5a and 5d.
Operative paragraph 5a states that the Council shall ‘promote human rights education and learning as well as advisory services, technical assistance and capacity-building, to be provided in consultation with and with the consent of Member States concerned.’ This, in turn, is an essential prerequisite to fulfilling the Council’s mandate under paragraph 5d to ‘promote the full implementation of human rights obligations undertaken by States’ – i.e., to secure on-the-ground impact.
In other words, the Council’s mandate under paragraph 5a, fulfilled through its work under agenda item 10, is essential to the body’s relevance and value to States, especially developing States, and to its impact – its ability to strengthen the enjoyment of human rights for all people, everywhere.
But are financial investments at the Council reflective of this importance?
To try to answer that question, URG analysed the regular budget implications of resolutions adopted, mechanisms established, and work undertaken over a six-year period (2020-2025), under Human Rights Council agenda item 10.
It found that, during this time, the budgetary implications of all item 10 (technical assistance and capacity-building to aid human rights implementation at national level) resolutions was only $40,699,300.
This compares, for example, with the budgetary implications of resolutions adopted (over the same period) to address thematic human rights concerns (under agenda item 3), for example through norm-clarification and norm-setting, the further development of international human rights law, and the establishment of thematic mechanisms (e.g., Special Procedures), which amounted to $88,975,900 (roughly twice as much).
Another important comparison is with the budgetary implications of resolutions adopted to address situations of human rights violations, and secure accountability, adopted under agenda items 2 and 4, which amounted to $172,439,400 ($70,857,200 under item 2, and $101,582,200 under item 4) – over four times more than the investments in delivering technical assistance and capacity-building. This heavy financial investment in investigate work is also illustrated by the budgetary implications of individual Commissions of Inquiry (COI). For example, since its establishment in 2011, the published programme budget implications (PBIs) for the COI on human rights violations in Syria have amounted to US$81,881,500.
That is not to say, of course, that the Council’s country-focused work under items 2 and 4 (and 7) is not extremely important – this, like the provision of technical assistance, is a crucial part of the body’s mandate as set by the GA (and is especially important for the victims of violations). Rather, it is to question whether such an imbalance in funding, with relatively little investment in the UN’s capacity-building work – which can potentially benefit people in all UN member States (the Council’s work under item 4 covers only around ten countries, while its work under item 2 covers around five), and has the potential to generate significant impact (because it is enjoys the cooperation of the State concerned) – is consistent with the vision set out in UN80.
Extrabudgetary or voluntary contributions
The foregoing relates only to financial investments from the UN’s regular budget. In reality, OHCHR also receives significant voluntary contributions from member States to support its work both as the UN agency responsible for human rights, and its work to service the Council and its mechanisms.
According to its ‘Appeal 2026,’ in 2025, OHCHR received US$257.8 million in extrabudgetary contributions (XB), significantly more than the US$191.5 million received from the UN’s regular budget, though less than the US$500 million it had hoped to receive in XB contributions in 2025 (as stated in its 2025 aspirational budget).
Of this US$257.8 million, 67 per cent was earmarked for specific programmes or projects, and 33 per cent unearmarked.
There does not appear to be any publicly available data on the proportion of these extrabudgetary contributions that goes to capacity-building and technical assistance, though the fact (again, according to ‘Appeal 2026’) that 49 per cent of it is directed towards OHCHR’s field presences, is a positive sign, as is the fact that (according to OHCHR’s ‘UN Human Rights Report 2024’) OHCHR expenditure on the ‘Human rights in the field’ budget line was both the highest of all budget lines in 2024 (US$171.2 million), and the highest in terms of the expenditure of extrabudgetary funds – US$153.1 million (54 per cent of all XB expenditure in 2024). Notwithstanding, it should be noted that the ten budget lines referenced in the OHCHR annual report are ambiguous in terms of exactly what kinds of activities are included therein. Are, for example, expenditures under the ‘Human rights in the field’ budget line all related to the provision of services (especially capacity-building and technical assistance) to member States, or do they – more likely – also include the (probably very large) XB contributions by developed countries to Commissions of Inquiry and other investigative mechanisms?
A considerable part of the extrabudgetary contributions earmarked for human rights technical assistance and capacity-building work is channelled through the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in the Field of Human Rights. Over the course of 2024, the Voluntary Fund received a total income of US$30.4 million. Importantly, some of these funds were specifically earmarked for the Human Rights Adviser (HRA) programme, a key part of OHCHR’s capacity to deliver technical assistance in the field. This helped OHCHR to partially compensate for the closure in 2024 of the Human Rights Mainstreaming Multi-Donor Trust Fund (which had previously supported the HRA programme). Notwithstanding, the closure of the Mainstreaming Trust Fund is expected to see the number of Human Rights Advisors deployed to UN Country Teams decline from 56 in 2024 to a projected 26 in 2026.
According to its 2024 annual report, in 2024, the Voluntary Fund provided resources for technical cooperation programmes in 56 regions, countries and territories (compared to 59 in 2023).
Regionalisation of support services
Partly to compensate for the reduction in Human Rights Advisors, but especially in order to enhance its operational effectiveness and impact at a time of diminishing resources, and respond to the call in the UN80 reforms to strengthen the delivery of services to States, and bring that support closer to the field (for the benefit of both rights-holders and duty-bearers), over recent years OHCHR has embarked on an ‘Organisational Effectiveness 2.0’ programme of reforms. A key pillar of those reforms is to move OHCHR expertise (covering different human rights issues and concerns) out of Geneva and into OHCHR’s regional offices (located in Panama City, Yaoundé, Addis Ababa, Vienna, Beirut, and Bangkok).
While there are still questions as to how this will work in practice (for example, will OHCHR expertise be divided between the regional offices, or will each office aim to have at its disposal the full range of necessary human rights expertise relevant to its region?), this regionalisation effort, designed to bring OHCHR expertise and technical assistance closer to both States and rights-holders, including as a contribution to sustainable development, holds great potential. First, by pooling expertise in the regions, where it can also be more easily projected to country-level, the strategy should be more cost-effective than deploying Human Rights Advisors to individual countries. Second, if carried through successfully (according to sources, in 2026 OHCHR is deep in the process of moving experts from Geneva to its regional offices), the reforms are likely to significantly boost the UN’s capacity to deliver human rights technical assistance and capacity-building support, thereby strengthening the enjoyment of human rights, accelerating progress towards the SDGs leaving no one behind, and preventing crises and conflicts.
Featured image: Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Nada Al-Nashif delivers a statement during the organisational meeting of the 61st session of the Human Rights Council, 9 February 2026.
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