In October 2022, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) voted against holding a debate on human rights abuses against ethnic Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang province. The decision sparked an outcry in the human rights community and was widely seen as evidence of China’s influence over the HRC. More generally, the anecdote raises the broader question of whether and how powerful illiberal states succeed in undermining key liberal international norms.
Building on the norm dynamics literature in International Relations, we argue that illiberal states act as norm entrepreneurs with the capacity to proactively develop and spread rival norms in line with their own interests. We derive hypotheses about the types of norms that illiberal states promote, the international fora that they use, the tools of statecraft that they employ, and the effectiveness of their illiberal norm promotion.
We test these hypotheses by introducing HR-RES, the most comprehensive dataset of human rights resolutions to date, covering the universe of HRC decisions with granular resolution-specific information (sponsors, topic classifications, votes cast, full resolution texts, etc.). Developing new measures for the human-rights friendliness of resolutions based on natural language processing, we find evidence for our hypotheses in panel regressions: Illiberal states like China systematically promote illiberal norms while consistently undermining human-rights friendly resolutions. Receiving Chinese aid and bilateral bailouts predicts voting alignment with China on resolutions with illiberal content; intangible tools of statecraft are ineffective. Topic modeling suggests a gradual shift in resolution content consistent with illiberal influence over the HRC.