Emergency Exit or Dead End? UN Human Rights Advocacy is at a Crossroads

Some would argue that there couldn’t be a worse time to increase engagement with the United Nations (UN).

With authoritarianism on the rise, multilateral institutions are also coming under increasing pressure. Powerful states seek to reshape them to serve their own political interests. This is often at the expense of accountability and transparency, and with the aim of excluding non-state actors.

What is currently happening at the UN thus reflects a worrying trend that began several years ago at the national level, when more and more governments started to restrict the scope of action for civil society. And it was precisely this trend that prompted Helvetas to expand and strengthen its cooperation with the UN.

Civil society: Filling the space between state and individual

“Civil society” takes many forms. It ranges from formal, institutionalized non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to less formalized neighborhood groups, parents’ committees or spontaneous citizen movements. Whether they are big or small, and whether they engage on behalf of people with disabilities, for environmental protection or in pursuit of free school meals — what unites them is that they represent the interests of a specific group or community and are led by neither the state nor a private company.  

Thus, civil society organizations (CSOs) play a vital role in inclusive and sustainable development: They provide citizens with an opportunity to gain, gather, hold and exchange information, to participate in shaping development policies and partnerships, to initiate and oversee the implementation of these policies, and to claim their legitimate rights as citizens.

For decades, CSOs have filled the space between the state and individuals, addressing small and big concerns and challenging existing structures by speaking truth to power. This is why in its program countries, Helvetas supports and partners with various types of CSOs through institutional strengthening, strategy development, networking and small grants. Recent examples include projects in Kyrgyzstan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Bhutan.

Unfortunately, such work has become much more difficult in recent years.

Shrinking civic space around the globe

For the last two decades, civil society around the globe has observed growing efforts to restrict citizens’ engagement and CSO operations. Today, many CSOs work in an environment where their operational and political space is increasingly limited.

Such shrinking civic space leads to the exclusion of civil society from public debates and policy making, which severely curtails the room for non-state actors to maneuver. Eventually, this undermines the foundation of inclusive sustainable development, which depends on open exchanges and joint efforts across all sectors.

Prominent examples where civic space has rapidly deteriorated include countries such as Serbia, Ethiopia and Myanmar. Yet according to the CIVICUS World Monitor, this trend can be observed nearly everywhere, including many countries of the Western hemisphere.

Most OECD-DAC donor agencies keep acknowledging CSOs as “independent development actors in their own right” and continue praising their importance for the United Nation’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. However, little has happened to actively reverse this worrying trend and better protect and support civic space. Instead, local civil society finds itself increasingly excluded from relevant development debates and cut off from funding opportunities.

The United Nations as a “way out”

Helvetas is committed to trying to maintain its support for local CSOs, even in repressive contexts. The organization therefore started exploring alternative processes and spaces at the regional and international levels that would allow productive dialogue between civil society and the state, without bringing unnecessary risks. While Helvetas had already worked through international thematic networks and alliances to advance certain issues in the past, it had not yet aligned its advocacy work with a rights-based approach and had rarely used existing human rights mechanisms in a systematic manner.

This is how, starting in 2018, our engagement with the UN Human Rights System began. The UN’s elaborate system offers several entry points and mechanisms for advocacy beyond national boundaries, through which national decision makers can be held to account. It allows non-state actors to address sensitive issues without exposure, and to discuss them in a safe space. Even though the UN system might at times appear overly complex, it is actually accessible for everyone, including local civil society.

Consequently, Helvetas followed the learnings of the guidance paper “Advocating Through the UN Human Rights System,” and began to encourage and systematically support local CSOs in making use of the UN system to raise their issues of concern — especially those from countries affected by shrinking civic space.

The UN Human Rights Council — a key mechanism

The key mechanism for this advocacy in the UN system is the Human Rights Council, based in Geneva. It is one of the UN’s principal human rights institutions, alongside the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and other bodies instrumental in advancing the UN’s human rights pillar. The Human Rights Council serves as the main intergovernmental forum within the UN for addressing human rights issues. It operates through several monitoring mechanisms, including the Universal Periodic Review, Special Rapporteurs and Working Groups focused on both country-specific and thematic issues.

Through the Universal Periodic Reviews at the Human Rights Council, local non-state actors can bring their concerns to the attention of the international community, build wider support, and urge their government to respond to their demands. Depending on the risks involved, this can be done in an open or anonymous manner. If done in a systematic and persistent way, this can help to create new opportunities for constructive policy dialogue in the respective country between civil society and state authorities.

As an INGO with presence in numerous countries of the Global South as well as in Switzerland and the United States, Helvetas is well-positioned to assume the role of a facilitator, enabler and door opener in this process. In recent years, Helvetas has encouraged and facilitated civil society submissions to the Human Rights Council from several Helvetas partner countries on human rights concerns like access to water and sanitation (Nepal, Haiti), discrimination against women (Tajikistan), and protection from climate change (Bangladesh), as well as civic rights in highly repressive national contexts.

Most recently, Helvetas supported a group of Nepalese CSOs to submit a report on the human rights situation in Nepal, focusing on water and sanitation as well as on marginalized young women who are excluded from vocational education and other basic services. This followed a report submitted almost five years prior. Together, the two reports allowed reflection on previous recommendations, progress made by the government, and issues that require further attention. Such long-term engagement can strengthen CSOs; it allows them to demonstrate continuity and persistence and to position themselves as reliable and knowledgeable development partners for state authorities.

But even where governments are unwilling to accept civil society support in implementing Universal Periodic Review recommendations, participation in a review can add value for local civil society actors. A CSO representative who submitted a stakeholder report on civic rights in his conflict-torn home country pointed out: “The Universal Periodic Review process itself was instrumental in bridging the gap between national NGOs and INGOs like Helvetas, and in removing the misperception that INGOs receive more privileges than national NGOs. Also, the findings of the review workshop were used for further advocacy on freedom of association.”

Better outreach with ECOSOC consultative status

After a few years of facilitating local civil society submissions to the Human Rights Council, Helvetas applied for consultative status with the United Nation’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which was granted in 2025. The status allows non-state actors to attend meetings, submit written and oral statements, lobby member states during Universal Periodic Reviews and to organize side events during Human Rights Council sessions. Thus, it considerably enlarges the room for non-state actors to maneuver, who are otherwise excluded from many spaces and processes.

The status allows Helvetas to directly address relevant country missions at the Human Rights Council and to ask them to promote and defend certain demands and issues. What may sound like a technocratic formality is actually a major step forward for the advocacy of Helvetas and its local CSO partners. Unlike in the past, Helvetas can now follow up on CSO submissions in a systematic and strategic manner.  Even more importantly, status holders are allowed to invite local partner CSOs to select events and meetings so that they can speak on their own behalf. This perfectly fits with Helvetas’ idea of what good advocacy should do — encourage and support local voices so that they can make themselves heard and convey their messages to those who should hear and act.  

Shrinking space: Spillover to the UN system

The joy over Helvetas’ newly acquired status was somewhat dampened, as at the same time the UN was sliding into the biggest crisis in its history. When the US government in early 2025 started to freeze and cut its payments to various UN bodies and initiatives, many other governments followed suit. This led to massive funding gaps for essential UN organizations (including UNHCR, UNDP and UNICEF), central institutions (such as the UN Human Rights Council), and UN host cities (e.g., Geneva).

In an attempt to counter the negative trend, the UN Secretary-General in May 2025 announced UN80, a system-wide reform effort to make the UN “more agile, integrated and equipped to respond to today’s complex global challenges amid tightening resources.” In other words, the UN turned to survival mode. This included the downsizing and merger of UN agencies, funds and programs, and the dismissal of staff.

The Human Rights Council, too, had to decrease its annual spending. The council shortened the three annual sessions by two and a half days each; this was achieved by limiting the speaking time during debates and removing certain debates altogether. CSO representatives like Phil Lynch, executive director of the Geneva-based International Service for Human Rights, warned that measures like these would disproportionally affect CSOs who depend on longer and flexible debate formats to voice their concerns and make their case in front of government representatives.

What is even more worrying is that all of this adds to ongoing systematic attempts by certain UN member states to further shrink — or outright eliminate — the space for non-state actors within the UN system. Hence, what’s currently happening inside the UN — whether as an intended or unintended consequence — reflects what has been ongoing in many UN member states for years: The rapid deterioration of civic space for public dialogue and citizen engagement.

Claim the space, keep trying

It’s clear why some might rightly argue that this was a terrible time for Helvetas to deepen engagement with the UN. Given the institution’s current state and the bleak prospects for its future, there are no guarantees that civil society advocacy through the UN Human Rights system will bring concrete results. Now, more than ever, multilateral advocacy requires patience, persistence and the ability to embrace failure.

But at a time when civic space is shrinking at all levels and at an unprecedented pace, civil society must stand together, keep trying and claim whatever space there still is — all while rejecting authoritarian tendencies wherever possible. In this sense, there has never been a better time to get involved with the UN.