US Skips UN Rights Review Again—Should It Get Another Chance?

The United States is due to face its Universal Periodic Review (UPR) in Geneva on November 10. The UPR is the United Nations’ peer review of every member state’s human rights record. But Washington is unlikely to appear: the Trump administration announced in 2025 that the US would not take part. The US already failed to show up in November 2025, and the review was rescheduled. If it misses next week’s session too, it should not receive another extension. It should not be exempt from a process that, as the name says, applies to every UN member country. Ahead of the review, US and international rights groups—including Human Rights Watch—filed 192 submissions on a range of human rights issues. The civil society reports paint a troubling picture: the US government’s rights record has worsened sharply over the past year. Under President Trump’s direction, the US government dismantled its civil rights enforcement system. It has violated the ban on non-refoulement (the rule against sending people to countries where they face torture) and sent Venezuelan men to torture in El Salvador’s prisons. The administration also continues to retaliate against opponents, restrict the rights of transgender people, and remove regulations that limit climate-warming pollutants, among other actions. In an unprecedented attack on the rule of law, it escalated sanctions against the International Criminal Court (ICC), targeting the court as a whole. State laws and targeted federal funding cuts have sharply reduced access to safe abortion and other reproductive health care in many states, curtailing women’s rights. During the immigration crackdown, authorities have separated breastfeeding and other parents from their children. They have also detained pregnant women, despite a longstanding government policy that tells agencies to avoid this except in limited cases. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has raised concerns about deaths in immigration detention, harmful migration policies and enforcement, and sanctions against the ICC and Palestinian rights groups. UN Special Procedures experts have also flagged unlawful killings at sea, the allegedly arbitrary removal of immigration judges and politicization of immigration courts, and unlawful use of lethal force by immigration enforcement agents. The US government is trying to avoid international scrutiny of these serious and well-documented abuses. The Human Rights Council should not allow that. This is a time for more rights scrutiny of the US, not less.