In July 2021, a new U.N. group launched in New York, the self-proclaimed “Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations” (GOF). The group appears to have been Beijing’s initiative, although early on China stated that Venezuela had a leading role.
The GOF members are Algeria, Belarus, Bolivia, China, Cuba, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Mali, Nicaragua, the State of Palestine, the Russian Federation, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
Despite its name, this group, which includes many of the world’s most repressive regimes, is anything but a friend of the U.N. Charter. While the GOF claims to support the purposes of the United Nations, its positions risk undermining protection of individual rights, the importance of civil and political liberties, and any meaningful scrutiny of human rights abuses perpetrated by U.N. member states.
The GOF is comprised of 18 nations whose records and actions demonstrate malign intent toward the U.N. and its principles. For example, of the 18 countries in the GOF, at least 10 of them have been highlighted in the U.N. Secretary General’s (UNSG) recent reports on countries engaging in reprisals against its citizens interacting with the U.N. human rights system. A number of these countries have, in fact, regularly appeared in these report; for example, China has been mentioned in every UNSG’s reprisals report since the report’s inception in 2010.
Most GOF countries also have deeply problematic human rights records. Freedom House has categorized 15 of the 18 GOF nations as “Not Free,” and many of them have some of the lowest global scores, such as Belarus, China, and North Korea – all of which have single digit scores on a 100 point scale.
This leads to questions about the real intent of the GOF.
While the GOF claims to be acting “in defense of” the U.N. Charter, the GOF’s substantive positions risk altering existing human rights norms and weakening key U.N. and other international tools intended to ensure accountability for rights abusing nations. The language and framing employed by the GOF often echoes China’s, with its insistence on “dialogue and cooperation,” rather than accountability, as the most appropriate way to address human rights concerns.
For example a January 2024 communique and other GOF statements advanced the GOF’s “conviction that there is no other option than dialogue, cooperation, engagement, and national ownership in every process that has as its real objective the strengthening of human rights….” This language is troubling not only because it elevates “dialogue and cooperation” above scrutiny and accountability, but also because it uses the guise of “national ownership” to insist that the U.N. human rights system should defer to the government in question – even governments that actively perpetrate human rights violations, such as arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearance, to maintain their power.
As a North American diplomat put it during an interview in September 2024, the GOF’s position is “stay out of our business” even when that business involves gross human rights abuses or crimes against humanity.
With Venezuela often out in front, this group of 18 nations has disseminated joint written statements, delivered oral statements at various U.N. fora, issued declarations and communiques, and hosted diplomatic events in an effort to propagate these views. The GOF is incredibly prolific. It has issued a total of 107 verbal statements at the United Nations and 38 communiques or written positions. The group meets at least quarterly at the permanent representative level and every fall at the foreign minister level in conjunction with the High-Level Week of the U.N. General Assembly.
While many of the GOF states are also part of a larger illiberal coalition of countries known as the Like-Minded Group (LMG), the GOF may have emerged because not all of the LMG members endorsed some of the group’s extreme views, such as characterizing sanctions as violating the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, labeling them as illegal, and insisting that they exacerbate human rights challenges. A diplomat who previously served in Geneva stated that, at times “the LMG’s name was invoked even when not all the countries had agreed to the statement.”
A human rights NGO representative noted that many of the states in the GOF could also be referred to as the “dirty dozen” for their political repression and “revisionist” attempts to weaken existing human rights norms.
Nearly two years after its creation, the GOF expanded its reach with the launch of a Geneva chapter in March 2023. The group’s presence in Geneva positions it to bring its ruse of defending sovereignty and multilateralism as a way to protect countries from human rights accountability to the center of the U.N. human rights regime – the U.N. Human Rights Council. While the group claims that many of the Geneva-based “international forums are being… weaponized and politicized, with agenda of dubious nature,” their complaints seem aimed at protecting themselves from human rights scrutiny and weakening the mechanisms that enable the international community to urge governments to cease their rights abuses.
The GOF has taken aim at sanctions or “unilateral coercive measures” (UCMs) – a term countries opposed to sanctions have developed to give the use of this diplomatic tool a negative connotation. Indeed, at least nine of the GOF countries have been sanctioned by the United States alone. Following a meeting of the Geneva chapter in May 2023, the group issued a statement against, among other things, “the promulgation and application of unilateral coercive measures, which remain the greatest obstacle on the development plans of targeted nations, while negatively impacting the full realization of the human rights of their peoples.”
The importance of attacking the use of sanctions as a key issue to the GOF is reflected by the fact that one of the few side events it has organized to date highlighted UCMs: the event, titled the “Impact of Unilateral Coercive Measures on the Right to Health and Right to Development,” was held in New York on October 2023. Unsurprisingly, the Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, who hails from GOF member Belarus, participated in the side event and has carried the group’s water. The GOF has endorsed this mandate, which asserts “that unilateral coercive measures and practices are contrary to international law, international humanitarian law, the U.N. Charter….”
The GOF has proven adept at building on previous efforts that were undertaken prior to the group’s founding either by GOF members or LMG members. For example, the creation of a U.N. Special Rapporteur on UCMs was backed by Iran in 2014 and the first mandate holder hailed from Algeria. Of the 11 countries the rapporteur has visited since the mandate was created in 2014, six are members of the GOF and these visits have been used as opportunities to criticize the use of sanctions and claim that they harm the general population. This enables GOF countries to cite relevant U.N. resolutions as well as thematic reports and statements from the Special Rapporteur, and findings and recommendations contained in the related HRC Advisory Committee’s 2015 report.
The GOF has also claimed that with the expansion in the use of UCMs in recent years, there has been a growing negative impact on progress toward the realization of the Sustainable Development Goals of the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as the right to development. In the context of the right to food, the GOF has not minced words: In 2022 the group wrote in a special declaration on food security (but without providing support for the claim): “We cannot overemphasize, in this context, the cruelty of these illegal measures, which seek among others, to deprive entire populations from their means of subsistence, in flagrant violation of the basic norms of international law.”
The GOF continues to take action in the U.N., including advancing resolutions that propagate the group’s views and highlighting reports by the Special Rapporteur. For example, GOF support helped secure the passage of a 2023 U.N. General Assembly Resolution on “Unilateral economic measures as a means of political and economic coercion against developing countries,” which contained the GOF’s customary positions.
Further, during the biennial panel discussion in 2023 on UCMs and human rights in the Human Rights Council, Venezuela spoke on behalf of the GOF, claiming that sanctions are “extraterritorial” and “had a negative impact on the enjoyment, realization of all human rights, including the right to development, life and peace.”
Special Rapporteur Douhan issued a report in 2024 following her trip to China that claimed that sanctions against China were causing economic harm.
Aside from denigrating the use of sanctions, the GOF’s long-term game appears intended to divert attention away from human rights abuses inflicted by governments on their people, and instead to turn the spotlight on the United States, other Western governments, and the European Union, which have enacted sanctions based on bona fide human rights concerns. The repressive governments in the GOF then can get yet another “nothing to see here” pass – the blame for everything bad happening in their country lies with the sanctioning countries.