Even as it engages with U.N. human rights institutions, China has worked consistently and often aggressively to silence criticism of its human rights record before U.N. bodies and has taken actions aimed at weakening some of the central mechanisms available in those institutions to advance rights. Because of China’s growing international influence, the stakes of such interventions go beyond how China’s own human rights record is addressed at the U.N. and pose a longer-term challenge to the integrity of the system as a whole.
