On 13 October, 181 governments cast secret ballots in the UN General Assembly to fill 15 seats on the Human Rights Council. There were 15 candidates. Every one of them won, none with fewer than 160 votes. Burundi, which Human Rights Watch had singled out for what it called abusive conditions at home, was re-elected with 160. It was the second year running in which every regional group put forward exactly as many candidates as there were seats, and Human Rights Watch’s UN director said the result makes a mockery of the word “election”.
It is tempting to file this under routine UN theatre. For Bangladesh it deserves more attention than that. Earlier this month it was argued that Bangladesh’s interest in Security Council reform lies in a stronger, more accountable General Assembly, where every member has a vote, and that elections are one of the few tools smaller states have to hold powerful bodies to account. The Human Rights Council vote tests that argument directly. If the Assembly cannot run a competitive election for a human rights body, why should anyone trust it with a larger say over war and peace?
A vote designed to mean something
The Human Rights Council was created in 2006 precisely because its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights, had lost credibility over who sat on it. General Assembly resolution 60/251 tried to fix that through elections. Members are chosen individually, by secret ballot, and each needs an absolute majority of the Assembly, 97 votes. Voters are asked to weigh each candidate’s human rights record and its pledges, and the Assembly can suspend a member for gross violations by a two-thirds vote. It did so to Libya in 2011 and to Russia in 2022.
Seats are shared out by region: 13 each for Africa and Asia-Pacific, eight for Latin America and the Caribbean, seven for Western Europe and others, and six for Eastern Europe. Each group decides how many candidates to field. When it offers a “clean slate”, with exactly as many candidates as seats, the Assembly’s choice shrinks to a formality; a candidate needs only 97 votes, and nobody has to lose.
When the choice is real, it bites. In 2023 Russia failed to regain a seat after its suspension. In 2024 the Asia-Pacific group was the only one with a contested slate, six candidates for five seats, and Saudi Arabia came last with 117 votes, seven behind the Marshall Islands, after a campaign by rights groups. Bangladesh knows the difference too: in 2022 it won a contested Asia-Pacific race with 160 of 189 votes, while the Republic of Korea lost out. The foreign ministry of the day presented that tally as a rebuttal to criticism of the country’s record. Whatever one makes of that claim, it only carried weight because there had been a real contest. In 2025 and 2026, no group offered one at all.
Why everyone likes a clean slate
It would be easy to blame the abusive governments that slip through. The harder truth is that clean slates suit almost everyone, including countries with decent records and modest budgets.
The principled case should be about fairness. Regional rotation gives smaller and poorer states a predictable turn on bodies they might struggle to win in an open fight against richer, better-connected neighbours. Contested UN elections are expensive: campaigns, receptions, travel, and the quiet trading of votes across different UN bodies. A rotation agreed in advance spares a least developed country that bill, and spares a region the spectacle of neighbours defeating each other in public.
The convenient case is about cover. A clean slate means no candidate is ever judged against an alternative. A government facing criticism at home can arrive in Geneva on the same footing as one with a strong record. The Assembly’s formal duty to weigh each candidate’s record becomes a box that 181 delegations tick in private.
Both cases are real, and the same capital can hold both at once. That is the familiar pattern of UN politics: principle and interest arriving together, each lending the other some respectability. Rights groups such as the International Service for Human Rights now urge regional groups to field more candidates than seats every year. Some campaigners also point out that even in an uncontested vote, the number of ballots a candidate receives carries a message. Burundi’s 160 was the lowest this year. It was still 63 votes more than it needed.
What a hollow election costs
The convenience is real, but so is the bill, and it is paid by people who never see a ballot.
Let’s start with the Council’s own authority. Its most useful instruments, the periodic review of every country’s record, the special rapporteurs, the fact-finding missions on Ukraine, Sudan and the occupied Palestinian territories, work by moral pressure rather than enforcement. A government under investigation has an obvious defence: who are you to judge? That defence is much easier to make when the judges were installed without a contest. Every uncontested cycle hands that line to the next government that wants it.
Then there is the standard the Assembly set for itself. Resolution 60/251 asks members to weigh each candidate’s human rights record and the pledges it makes. A clean slate quietly repeals that duty. The pledges still get written, and the pledging events still get held, but nothing hangs on them, because there is no rival candidate against whom a weak record could count. The criteria survive on paper while the mechanism meant to enforce them stops working.
There is also a cost to the General Assembly itself, and this is the one that should worry smaller states most. The Assembly’s claim to authority is that it is the one place where all 193 members vote as equals. That claim rests on its votes meaning something. When regional groups settle the outcome in advance and the Assembly’s role shrinks to ratifying a list, the chamber starts to resemble what its critics have long said it is: a debating society that formalises decisions taken elsewhere. The permanent members of the Security Council have never needed to argue that case. An Assembly that will not contest 15 Geneva seats makes it for them.
Finally, there is the precedent. Clean slates are becoming the norm rather than the exception, and 2026 is the second consecutive year in which no regional group offered a choice. Habits at the UN harden into expectations. A group that fields an extra candidate next year will be accused of breaking an understanding, which makes each year of unanimity more likely to be followed by another.
Where Bangladesh comes in
For Bangladesh, this is not a distant procedural argument. The Council is the UN body that has done the most sustained work on what happened in Rakhine: it created the fact-finding mission on Myanmar in 2017 and, in 2018, the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, which collects and preserves evidence of the gravest crimes for future prosecutions. Myanmar has never recognised it. That mandate rests on resolutions passed by whoever holds the 47 seats. A Council assembled without scrutiny is a weaker advocate for 1.2 million people living in camps in Cox’s Bazar with no return in sight.
Bangladesh is also not a bystander in how the system works. It has been elected five times, in 2006, 2009, 2014, 2018 and 2022, serving every term the rules then allowed, through both comfortable races and closely fought ones. It has been on the receiving end of UN scrutiny too. That experience is an argument for speaking up rather than against it, and open contests cost something: campaign money, favours owed, the risk of visible defeat, all of which fall hardest on countries with modest budgets.
A middle path is available. Within the Asia-Pacific group, Bangladesh could favour slates with at least one more candidate than seats, even in years when it is not running; when it does run, it could welcome competition openly and publish pledges that civil society can test. None of this requires choosing a camp among the great powers. It only requires applying to Geneva the test that smaller states already apply to New York, because the case for a stronger General Assembly rests on the idea that the many can check the few.
That idea needs ballots with names that can lose.
Source Note
• Al Jazeera/AP, UN Human Rights Council elects 15 members in uncontested vote, 14 Oct 2026
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Results of the election of members of the Human Rights Council (vote counts), 14 Oct 2026
• ISHR, #HRCelections2026 and Saudi Arabia loses bid to join the Council, Oct 2024
• Daily Ittefaq, Bangladesh wins in UNHRC membership election, Oct 2022; The Financial Express, Human rights, Bangladesh and the UN Human Rights Council
• Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, report to the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/48/18), on its establishment under resolution 39/2
• UN General Assembly resolution 60/251 (2006), establishing the Human Rights Council
• The Bangladesh Dialogue, The UN’s New Power Game, 3 Oct 2026
About Author:
Rafid Al Azwad
Executive, TBD