The Empty Chair in Geneva

The record is public, and it is short.

1. August 28, 2025

   The administration tells the UN it will not take part in its fourth review and files no national report. (ASIL)

2. November 7, 2025

   The review is called in Geneva. The US seats are empty. The Council adopts a decision on non-cooperation and reschedules for 2026. (AFP via RNZ)

3. November 10, 2026

   The rescheduled review is called. The US is absent again. (UN Human Rights Council)

4. November 10, 2026

   The Council expresses regret over “continued non-cooperation,” urges the US to return, and sets a third date: January 18–29, 2027. (Anadolu)

The Council also said it will consider further steps before that January session ends. The current review cycle closes in mid-2027. The clock is running.

One other country has ever missed its review. Israel skipped in January 2013 and came back within the year. No country has ever stayed away twice. Amnesty International says the United States is now the first nation to avoid every stage of the process (Amnesty).

The Universal Periodic Review is the one human rights process on Earth that covers every country, with no exceptions and no favorites.

The UN General Assembly created it in 2006 under Resolution 60/251. Reviews began in 2008. All 193 member states take a turn, roughly every four and a half years. A country files a report on its own record. Other countries ask questions and make recommendations. Civil society submits evidence. Nothing in it is binding. Nobody is sentenced. It is a conversation among peers, held in public.

The United States sat for that conversation in 2010, in 2015, and in 2020. That third review happened under the first Trump administration, two years after it had already quit the Human Rights Council. The same president who showed up then refuses now.

So this is not tradition. It is not a long-held American position. It is a new choice, made by this administration, in this term.

Before we go further, the truth about the years we did show up. Both parties own this part.

After the 2020 review, Washington said it accepted over 80 percent of the recommendations it received (US pledge to the UN).

Accepting is not doing. In 2010 and again in 2015, the government agreed to “consider” ratifying the core treaties on women’s rights, children’s rights, disability rights and economic rights (HRW). It never ratified them. It promised to close Guantanamo. Guantanamo is open. By 2019 the ACLU reported that key promises made under the Obama administration were still largely unkept (ACLU).

So no, the chair being filled did not make us righteous. Democrats and Republicans both sat in it, nodded, and went home to do too little.

But they sat in it. They put the record on the table and let the world read it. That is the floor. This administration has gone beneath the floor.

The empty chair is one piece of a larger retreat from every body that can ask this government a hard question.

• February 2025An executive order pulls the US out of the Human Rights Council. Days later, Executive Order 14203 authorizes sanctions on the International Criminal Court. (policy tracker)
• June 2025Four sitting ICC judges are sanctioned. (JURIST)
• August 2026The president of the ICC herself is sanctioned. (HRW)
• September 2026At the UN General Assembly, the president calls on every member nation to quit the court. (Justice Info)
• October 2026Sweeping new sanctions land on the court as a whole. (AP)
• November 2026The second empty chair in Geneva.

The administration says the court is politicized and a threat to American sovereignty. That is its position, and it is entitled to argue it. But look at the direction of travel. Leave the council. Skip the review. Punish the judges. Each step removes one more place where power can be questioned.

Our direction is the opposite. Executive Order 2029-01 commits a Cordova administration to extradition for war crimes, with no exemption for our own officials. Accountability that stops at our border is not accountability.

This review was never about Geneva. It is about people in this country who have nowhere else to be heard.

Other nations came prepared with questions, including on the death penalty and abortion restrictions. The ACLU and its partners carried evidence on the treatment of immigrants, student protesters and LGBTQ people (NPR). Human Rights Watch notes the review is often the only time a country’s record is discussed at the UN at all, and the only global stage its civil society gets (HRW).

When the chair is empty, those questions go unanswered. Not because there were no answers. Because the people responsible for giving them decided you were not owed any.

A government answers to its people or it does not. One that will not answer to 192 peers in a non-binding conversation is practicing for the day it will not answer to you.

That is the part every American should sit with, whatever your party.

Demanding accountability from others means binding ourselves first. So here is the commitment.

1. 1

   We show up. In the first 100 days, the United States returns to the Universal Periodic Review and asks for the earliest available date.

2. 2

   We file an honest report. It will be written with public input from the communities it describes, and it will name our failures alongside our progress.

3. 3

   We answer every recommendation in public. Each one gets a written response: accepted, or declined with the reason stated.

4. 4

   We close the loophole. We will send Congress legislation making the report, the delegation and the public response a legal duty of the executive branch. No future president of any party gets to leave the chair empty on a whim.

This is the same principle behind the One Species Compact. No nation is above the question of how it treats human beings. Not our adversaries. Not our allies. Not us.