Zahra Yazdanmehr
Bachelor’s Student in Law, Shiraz University
Introduction
The sustainability and legitimacy of international human rights law depend, above all, on the existence of international monitoring mechanisms capable of translating States’ normative commitments into concrete and measurable conduct. Yet the implementation of international human rights law at the international level has historically been beset by double standards, politicization, and selectivity. The declining effectiveness and credibility of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights in the early 2000s—largely attributable to the politicization of its structure and the application of double standards toward different countries—prompted the United Nations General Assembly to establish the Human Rights Council in 2006 through Resolution 60/251. The most significant innovation introduced by this resolution was the creation of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a mechanism designed to assess, on a regular and equal basis, the human rights records of all 193 United Nations Member States.
During the first three cycles of the mechanism, from 2008 through the early 2020s, participation reached nearly 100 percent, making the process a unique model of multilateral diplomacy in which even politically isolated States and major powers participated in international human rights review. However, the decision of the United States Government on 28 August 2025 to withdraw from participation in the fourth cycle of the UPR, followed by its non-attendance at the review session scheduled for 7 November 2025, disrupted this well-established international practice. Although the United States withdrew from the Human Rights Council in 2018 and, in 2025, also announced the suspension of its engagement with the Council and its decision not to seek membership, this marked the first formally announced instance of a State declining to participate in its own UPR in this manner. The mechanism had, however, previously encountered instances of temporary non-cooperation or non-attendance, including in the case of Israel in 2013.
Genealogy, Legal Foundations, and Monitoring Structure of the UPR Mechanism
A critical assessment of the shortcomings of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights demonstrated that friction between State sovereignty and international scrutiny often stemmed from publicly condemnatory and confrontational approaches and an exclusive focus on particular countries. Against this backdrop, Kofi Annan, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, proposed in his 2005 report In Larger Freedom the creation of a new body with an explicit peer-review function, under which all countries, without exception, would be subject to scrutiny (Lane & Storey, 2025). The General Assembly responded to this need by incorporating paragraph 5 into Resolution 60/251, which mandated the Human Rights Council to undertake a universal periodic review of the human rights records of all States, based on objective and reliable information and in a manner ensuring universal coverage and equal treatment (United Nations, 2006).
The operational and institutional details of the UPR were subsequently elaborated in Human Rights Council Resolution 5/1 of 18 June 2007, which established the structure and stages of the review process (McNeilly, 2026). Under these arrangements, each review is based on three principal documents:
- the national report prepared by the State under review;
- a compilation prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights of information contained in United Nations documents and reports, including those of treaty bodies and special procedures;
- a summary of information submitted by other stakeholders, including non-governmental organizations and national human rights institutions (International Justice Resource Center, 2012).
The review takes place within the UPR Working Group, composed of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council, with each review facilitated by a troika of three States. It includes an interactive dialogue and the formulation of non-binding recommendations by other States (Center for Global Law and Justice, 2025). Understanding the position of the UPR within the broader United Nations human rights monitoring system requires an analytical comparison with other monitoring mechanisms, particularly treaty bodies and special procedures. Unlike treaty bodies, whose monitoring scope is limited to States parties to the relevant treaties, the UPR encompasses the full range of human rights and, in terms of the scope of review, extends without exception to all United Nations Member States. It is founded on the principle of universal participation and cooperation among States. This universality is enshrined in General Assembly Resolution 60/251 and in the subsequent institutional arrangements adopted by the Human Rights Council, and is linked to the general obligation of States to cooperate in the promotion and protection of human rights. It is precisely this universal scope that has made the UPR a mechanism capable of mitigating double standards and politicization (Schijf, 2016).
The United States’ Refusal to Participate in the Fourth UPR Cycle
The first formal indication that the United States was unwilling to continue participating in the mechanism emerged on 28 August 2025, during the UPR pre-sessions in Geneva, when Juliette De Rivero, Chief of the UPR Branch at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, announced that the U.S. Government had withdrawn its participation from the mechanism. Subsequently, the U.S. delegation declined to submit its national report by the prescribed deadline in August 2025 and did not attend the formal review session scheduled for 7 November 2025 in the Human Rights Council’s UPR Working Group (Paccamiccio & McKernan, 2025).
This decision was taken within the broader policy framework of the second Trump administration, which had announced in February 2025 that the United States would cease its participation in the Human Rights Council and would not seek membership in the body. Although Washington, following its withdrawal from the Council in 2018 during Trump’s first presidential term, nevertheless participated in the third UPR cycle in 2020 and submitted its national report (Human Rights Centre, 2025), the complete boycott of the process and refusal to submit a report in 2025 marked an unprecedented turning point in the history of the UPR. If U.S. non-cooperation continues and the country also declines to participate in the rescheduled review, the United States could become the first country in the history of the UPR to fail to complete an entire review cycle.
The official position of the United States Government, as articulated by State Department officials and U.S. diplomats, rests on several principal arguments. U.S. officials have emphasized that participation in the UPR would amount to endorsing the agenda and mandate of a Council that, in their view, has failed to strongly condemn the most serious human rights violators. Washington has also identified the existence of the Human Rights Council’s standing Agenda Item 7, concerning the human rights situation in Palestine, as evidence of disproportionate attention and systematic bias against Israel. U.S. diplomats have further stated that the United States is unwilling to subject its human rights record to assessment and criticism by States that are themselves among the most serious violators of human rights—a position that directly refers to the presence on the Council of countries such as Venezuela, China, and Sudan. Finally, Washington contends that the UPR has become a diplomatic instrument through which authoritarian regimes use procedural formalities as a shield and that the mechanism lacks genuine effectiveness in improving human rights conditions.
Legal, Political, and Strategic Analysis of the United States’ Decision
A precise interpretation of the United States’ decision requires a close examination of its official arguments and a distinction between those stated justifications and the underlying legal and geopolitical motivations. From a political perspective, the decision can be analyzed within the broader framework of the “America First” doctrine, an approach that has weakened the foundations of multilateralism and adopted a skeptical stance toward international institutions. Although the U.S. claim that the Human Rights Council is politicized does reflect certain objective realities of intergovernmental diplomacy, invoking that claim as a basis for boycotting the UPR is structurally contradictory from a legal standpoint. The very rationale underlying the mechanism is to neutralize such politicization by extending scrutiny to all 193 United Nations Member States on the basis of uniform standards. Accordingly, refusing to participate in the mechanism on the ground that the Council is politicized disregards the original purpose for which the UPR was established.
Alongside the critique of Washington’s official arguments, the timing of the decision is also relevant to understanding its broader dimensions. In the lead-up to the fourth UPR cycle in 2025, non-governmental organizations and international institutions had prepared detailed reports concerning human rights violations in the United States. Issues such as large-scale raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), structural racism within the judicial system, the use of disproportionate and coercive force by police in the suppression of protests, regression in the protection of reproductive rights and minority rights, as well as extraterritorial military operations and attacks on vessels accused of drug trafficking, had exposed Washington to severe legal criticism. From this perspective, the refusal to participate in the mechanism may be understood as a strategy for avoiding accountability in relation to these growing domestic and international challenges.
Throughout the history of its international relations, the United States has consistently sought to position itself as a global arbiter and evaluator of human rights, while resisting scrutiny of its own sovereignty through international mechanisms based on equal standards. Its failure to become a party to core instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child or the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, together with its current boycott of the UPR, can be viewed as interconnected elements of a continuous and coherent pattern in U.S. foreign policy. This approach has not been confined to non-participation in monitoring mechanisms but has also manifested itself financially. The Trump administration further announced that the United States would not pay the proportionate share of its assessed contribution to the United Nations regular budget allocated to the Human Rights Council. This decision was taken at a time when the United Nations was simultaneously facing a severe liquidity crisis, which also affected the work of the Human Rights Council and resulted in constraints on the implementation of certain mandates and reductions in meeting time (Lissowsky, 2025).
Withdrawal from the Human Rights Council versus Refusal to Participate in the UPR
One of the most significant misconceptions reflected in diplomatic discourse is the conflation of withdrawal from the Human Rights Council with refusal to participate in the UPR mechanism. From the perspective of the law of international organizations, these two actions rest on entirely distinct normative foundations and fundamental obligations. Under General Assembly Resolution 60/251, the Human Rights Council is composed of 47 Member States elected directly by the General Assembly for three-year terms. Accordingly, withdrawal from the Council merely entails relinquishing membership in a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly whose members are elected by the Assembly (Rosales, 2021).
By contrast, paragraph 5 of Resolution 60/251 established the UPR as a mechanism for reviewing the human rights situation of all United Nations Member States. This universal coverage is linked to the general obligation of UN members to cooperate in the promotion and protection of human rights. Accordingly, being subject to UPR review derives from membership in the United Nations and does not depend on a State’s membership in the Human Rights Council. Nevertheless, the universal scope of the review process must be distinguished from the question of the nature and degree of a State’s legal obligation to participate actively in every stage of the UPR. In this context, the Human Rights Council has called on the United States to resume its cooperation and has postponed the review of the country’s human rights record to the fifty-third session of the UPR Working Group, scheduled for November 2026.
Systemic and Strategic Implications for Human Rights
The implications of the United States’ decision can be classified across several broad legal and political dimensions. The principle of the universality of human rights entails not only the entitlement of all individuals to fundamental rights, but also the equal application of monitoring standards to all States. The refusal of a major power to submit to peer review undermines the principle of the sovereign equality of States in the human rights context and introduces double standards into the monitoring system.
Perhaps the most troubling consequence of this development is the normalization of defiance of international monitoring mechanisms. Authoritarian governments, or States whose human rights records are subject to serious criticism, may invoke the U.S. decision as a political and legal justification for similar conduct (Human Rights First, 2025). If a power that presents itself as a leader of the democratic order evades scrutiny, other States may likewise find a seemingly legitimate basis for failing to submit national reports or for boycotting review sessions.
One of the principal functions of the UPR is to provide civil society institutions with a formal legal avenue through which to highlight human rights concerns and exert pressure on governments by submitting “stakeholder reports” (Guerra & Moya, 2015). The United States’ refusal to participate significantly restricts the effectiveness of this formal international channel for human rights defenders. Nevertheless, U.S. civil society responded innovatively by organizing a “People’s UPR” in New York in order to document evidence and testimony from victims of human rights violations and to maintain pressure on the federal government through State and local officials. In addition, a group of locally elected officials in the United States sent a letter to the Human Rights Council calling for the review process to be completed regardless of the federal government’s participation.
Conclusion
The United States’ refusal to participate in the fourth cycle of the UPR has created an unprecedented crisis in the United Nations human rights monitoring system. Although this conduct cannot necessarily and straightforwardly be characterized as a breach of a freestanding treaty obligation, it stands in serious tension with the normative framework of the UPR, the principle of universality in review, and the well-established expectation that all United Nations Member States cooperate with the process. The inclusion of all UN Member States within the scope of the UPR does not depend on their elected membership in the Human Rights Council, although the nature and degree of their legal obligation to participate actively in every stage of the mechanism remain open to debate. Washington’s official arguments concerning the politicization of the Council or alleged bias against Israel are unpersuasive when measured against the very rationale of the UPR, which was designed precisely to counter selectivity and ensure equal scrutiny of all 193 Member States. The underlying motivations for the decision should instead be sought in the United States’ strategic efforts to shield its domestic and extraterritorial conduct from international scrutiny, to reproduce the logic of legal exceptionalism, and to weaken multilateral institutions within the broader framework of the “America First” policy.
In responding to this challenge, the Human Rights Council should, even if the United States continues to refuse cooperation, proceed with the country’s periodic review on the basis of reports compiled by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and documentation submitted by civil society, in order to prevent the entrenchment of a practice of evading international scrutiny. The Council could also formally recognize People’s UPR reports and engage with State and local authorities committed to international standards in order to keep the monitoring process operational and assess the effects of non-cooperation by major powers on the sustainability of the rules-based international order. Ultimately, the durability of the international human rights system requires the principles of universality and accountability to prevail over the unilateral calculations of powerful States, since exempting any State from the review process would mark the beginning of a broader weakening—and potentially the erosion—of the norms of international law.
References
- Lane, M., & Storey, A. (2025, November 3). Opting out of accountability: The United States and the implications of withdrawal from the Universal Periodic Review. EJIL: Talk! From: https://www.ejiltalk.org/opting-out-of-accountability-the-united-states-and-the-implications-of-withdrawal-from-the-universal-periodic-review/
- United Nations. (2006, April 3). Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 15 March 2006: Human Rights Council (A/RES/60/251). United Nations. From: https://ganhri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/GA-A-RES-60-251-English.pdf
- McNeilly, K. (2026). Human rights through the kaleidoscope: The UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review. The International Journal of Human Rights. 30(5), 996–1016. From: https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2025.2588188
- Center for Global Law and Justice. (2025, November 11). United States opts out of Universal Periodic Review. Northeastern University School of Law. From: https://cgljresourcehub.law.northeastern.edu/2025/11/11/united-states-opts-out-of-universal-periodic-review/
- Human Rights Centre “Antonio Papisca”. (2025, September 7). UPR: The United States of America has withdrawn its participation from the upcoming Universal Periodic Review. University of Padua. From: https://unipd-centrodirittiumani.it/en/news/upr-the-united-states-of-america-has-withdrawn-its-participation-from-the-upcoming-universal-periodic-review
- Lissowsky, M. (2025, November 7). Deafening silence – The 4th Universal Periodic Review of the USA. Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, Human Rights Hub Geneva. From: https://www.freiheit.org/human-rights-hub-geneva/deafening-silence-4th-universal-periodic-review-usa
- Rosales, S. (2021). II.2 Mandate and composition of the Human Rights Council: General Assembly Resolution 60/251. In The role of Argentina in the Human Rights Council. Editorial Teseo. From: https://doi.org/10.55778/ts877232950
- Human Rights First. (2025, August 28). Human Rights First decries U.S. boycott of UN Universal Periodic Review for further damaging U.S. credibility and international human rights norms. Human Rights First. From: https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/library/human-rights-first-decries-u-s-boycott-of-un-universal-periodic-review-for-further-damaging-u-s-credibility-and-international-human-rights-norms
- International Justice Resource Center. (2012). Primer for advocacy opportunities with the United Nations Human Rights Council. Northeastern University School of Law. From: https://ijrcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Primer-for-Advocacy-Opportunities-with-the-Human-Rights-Council.pdf
- Schijf, L. M. (2016, September 1). Compliance of states with the Universal Periodic Review [Master’s thesis, Erasmus University Rotterdam]. Erasmus University Thesis Repository. From: https://thesis.eur.nl/pub/36740/Schijf_final-version-1-.pdf
- Guerra, V., & Moya, M. J. (2015, July 28). An excellent tool for mainstreaming human rights. United Nations Sustainable Development Group. From: https://unsdg.un.org/latest/blog/excellent-tool-mainstreaming-human-rights
- Paccamiccio, N., & McKernan, L. (2025, November 7). US skips UN periodic rights review: Civil society groups flag backsliding on rights. Human Rights Watch. From: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/11/07/us-skips-un-periodic-rights-review
