Critics slam UN for new anti-Israel committee positions during budget cuts

Critics slammed the United Nations for rewarding a controversial anti-Israel Commission of Inquiry with four new positions worth up to three-quarters of a million dollars, even as the world body undergoes a severe cash crisis.

“When it comes to spending money for the spread of antisemitism, the U.N. doesn’t have a spending limit,” Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, told Fox News Digital.

On June 4, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem (COI), led by South African Navi Pillay, announced four new job openings for senior-level positions in Geneva. These include two P-2 level associate interpreters, one higher-level P-3 level human rights officer, and a still more senior P-4 level human rights officer.

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UN Secretary-General António Guterres is seen on a screen delivering a speech at the opening of the 58th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, on February 24, 2025. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

Combined, their salaries will range from $530,000 to $704,000, based on salary scales released by the U.N. and its location-based salary multiplier (set at .814 for Swiss employees), published in a document supplied to Fox News Digital by a diplomatic source. 

These salaries do not include other senior-level U.N. employee benefits, including dependent costs, housing allowances or relocation fees.

Bayefsky asked why the U.N.’s “belt-tightening exercise … applies to all kinds of urgent matters but exempts the COI, which has simultaneously gone on a spending-spree.”

“The COI was created to destroy the Jewish state and is now conducting itself accordingly.” She said its latest report, issued in June, is “totally unhinged” and “claims Israelis are like Nazis engaged in ‘extermination’ of the Palestinians, refers to those ‘extremist Jews,’ denies biblical history, [and] fuels antisemitism by claiming Jews defile Muslim holy sites.”

Controversial South African judge Navi Pillay, chair of the independent United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel arrives to a press conference in Geneva, on June 18, 2025.  (Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images.)

A spokesperson from the U.N. Human Rights Office did not respond to Fox News Digital’s questions about the Commission’s findings.

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Pillay and the COI have come under fire previously for anti-Israel sentiment. In January 2022, 42 Republicans and Democrats in Congress signed an open letter calling for the U.S. to defund the COI. The Representatives expressed concern that “Chairwoman Navi Pillay, while serving as U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014, repeatedly and unjustly accused Israel of committing war crimes.” They stated that while she condemned Israel, Pillay “reportedly said nothing at all about egregious human rights abuses in dozens of other countries which, unlike Israel, received the worst, ‘Not Free’ rating from the respected Freedom House.”

In October 2023, a representative from the U.S. Mission to the U.N. in Geneva said before the Third Committee of the U.N. that the U.S. “remains deeply concerned about the scope and nature of the open-ended Commission of Inquiry established in May 2021. The COI demonstrates a particular bias against Israel in subjecting it to a unique mechanism that does not exist for any other U.N. Member State.”

Anti-Israel demonstrators burn an American flag, on the day of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to a joint meeting of Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 24, 2024.  (Reuters/Nathan Howard)

In October 2024, a report from the COI excluded information about Hamas’ use of Kamal Adwan Hospital for operations, failed to recount the maltreatment Israeli hostages received at Gazan hospitals, and could “not verify” that tunnels found below Al-Shifa hospital “were used for military purposes.” Bayefsky said the report trafficked in blood libels.

In March, Pillay’s commission claimed that rape and sexual violence are part of the Israel Defense Force’s “standard operating procedures towards Palestinians.” Pillay also said that the IDF’s sexual violence creates “a system of oppression that undermines [Palestinians’] right to self-determination.” In response, Bayefsky called Pillay “the world’s leading champion of the 2001 U.N. ‘Durban Declaration’ slander that a Jewish state is a racist state.”  

Protestors demonstrate near Columbia University on February 2, 2024, in New York City.  (Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

In March 2024, Congress passed a budget bill that eliminated funding for the COI while simultaneously banning funds for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), according to the Jerusalem Post.

The U.N. Human Rights Council is already experiencing the impact of the organization’s liquidity crisis.

In a June 16 letter penned by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, the Human Rights Council outlines more than a dozen reports, as well as studies, regional workshops, and panels mandated by the Council, which could not be completed due to inadequate resourcing.

In response to a request for comment about how the COI has received additional personnel while the Human Rights Council deals with scarcity, spokesperson Pascal Sim told Fox News Digital that the Human Rights Council’s “views are only expressed in the resolutions and decisions that its 47 Member States adopt at the end of each of its sessions.”

The United Nations building in New York City. (Reuters/Mike Segar/File Photo)

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To the question of whether the council is in greater need of personnel or funds to fulfill its current workload, Sim said that “Member States of the U.N. are currently continuing consultations on this matter.”

In a press conference on July 1, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Policy Guy Ryder updated reporters on U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ cost-cutting UN80 Initiative. 

Ryder said that the U.N. recognizes “that we have a difficult task of untangling the undergrowth of decisions and resolutions and mechanisms that we put in place to implement them, and we wonder if we’re going to be able to advance significantly.”

Ryder also admitted that “When a similar review was undertaken 20 years ago, it ran rather quickly into the sand. It did not produce the results that were hoped for and expected at that time. We’re looking at that experience of 20 years ago, and we hope we can avoid some of the pitfalls.” 

However, Bayefsky said, “For decades, the U.N. has engaged in phony cost-saving measures while their actual expenditures have ballooned,” she said, noting that the U.S. “has always been satisfied by moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

 The exterior of the State Department complex in Washington, D.C.  (Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Bayefsky said that “it’s our government’s job to put an end to this devious calculus by immediately withholding the entire U.N. budget until such time as the dangerous lesions are removed. It’s our job to deny visas to the COI members planning to come to the United States in the next couple of months. 

“Contrary to popular belief, it is not required by the U.S.-U.N. host agreement to allow international travelers into the U.S. to fan the flames of antisemitism, and vandalize our fundamental values and the Constitution from the middle of New York City,” Bayefsky said. “We need a new boat, not new deck chairs.”

A budget proposal from the Trump administration leaked in April announced the intention to eliminate all expenditures to the U.N. and international organizations. 

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In response to questions about whether a decision about U.N. funding has been finalized, a senior State Department official told Fox News Digital that “President Trump is ensuring taxpayer dollars are used wisely. Any announcements regarding funding to international organizations will come from the President or the administration.”

The U.S., through its taxpayers, is the single-largest contributor to the U.N. In 2022, the U.N. reports that $18.1 billion, or 26.8%, of its $67.5 billion in expenditures came from the U.S.