Thomas Sowell famously said that socialism has failed so many times and in so many ways that only an intellectual would be incapable of seeing it.

Alena Douhan was born in Belarus, when that country was still part of the sphere of influence of the vast Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Less than a decade after the end of the Red Bloc, Douhan began working with the United Nations office in Minsk, while simultaneously pursuing her doctorate at Belarusian State University.

At this institution, where scandals involving attacks on academics who speak out against dictator Alexander Lukashenko abound, Douhan works as a professor of International Law and director of the Peace Research Center.

In March 2020, her career took a leap from academia to global diplomacy: she was appointed Special Rapporteur for the United Nations Human Rights Council. And from there, her perspective on peace has advanced, one that seems to favor withdrawing pressure on tyrannical regimes, firmly rooted in the view that “if we are good to them, they will be good to their people.”

Douhan is the second person to hold this position, shrouded in murky origins. Created by a 2014 resolution of the United Nations Human Rights Council, according to National Review, and nominated by Iran on behalf of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Special Rapporteurship would gather information on sanctions that allegedly violate international human rights law. “The list of countries that voted in favor reflects, unsurprisingly, that of countries that are usually subject to international sanctions for human rights violations: China, Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, and others,” the magazine noted.

Curiously, Douhan’s reports favor these same regimes and their allies.

On a recent visit to Cuba, the Special Rapporteur toured the island following routes carefully mapped out by the Palace of the Revolution. The expert heard only the official version of the supposed “repercussions of unilateral coercive measures” by the United States — that is, the embargo imposed after the nationalizations and the expropriation of properties belonging to U.S. citizens in the 1960s, which the regime insists on calling a “blockade.”

Not only did Douhan walk the streets, visit places, and speak with Cubans in Havana that had been previously approved, but being the intellectual that she is, she demonstrated in a report that the sanctions against the regime were what impoverished Cubans, not the failed centralized socialist model.

However, the academic believes that the U.S. sanctions against the regime, “complicated by risk reduction and over-compliance by third parties, limit the capacity of both the government and citizens for long-term planning and are suffocating the social fabric of Cuban society.”

But the reality is different. The U.S. embargo doesn’t confiscate farmers’ crops or prevent Cubans from going out to sea to fish; socialism does that. The embargo doesn’t prevent Cubans from freely pursuing entrepreneurial ventures, nor does it beat and imprison those who think differently; that is the work of socialism. The embargo didn’t ruin the infrastructure, productive industries, and sugar mills inherited from the Republic; socialism destroyed them. The embargo doesn’t build luxurious hotels for tourists while Havana’s houses collapse on its inhabitants; the embargo didn’t cause a lack of salt on an island; the embargo didn’t fill the streets with police cars instead of ambulances.

But Douham has insisted: “The shortage of essential machinery, spare parts, electricity, water, fuel, food, and medicine, along with the growing emigration of skilled workers, including medical personnel, engineers, and teachers, has serious consequences for the enjoyment of human rights, including the rights to life, food, health, and development.”

To offer more context, the expert should have highlighted the persecution of political dissidents and churches that did not align with the Communist Party’s ideology. Douhan deliberately ignored the more than one thousand political prisoners, the torture, and the violation of parents’ rights to educate their children according to their convictions.

It is also noteworthy that Havana agreed to receive Douhan. For years, multiple mechanisms of the United Nations system, including the Special Rapporteurs on torture and freedom of religion, have requested to visit the country, but have not been so successful. Did the regime sense that with this expert, it would once again be able to shift the blame for the internal crisis onto external factors?

A full report on Cuba’s visit to the United Nations Human Rights Council, including Douhan’s conclusions and recommendations, will be presented in September 2026. It would be miraculous if any pang of conscience led her to tell the truth about the unfortunate island.

But Cuba is not the only country to have benefited from the Belarusian intellectual’s gentle approach in her reports. When she announced her visit to Venezuela, which finally took place in 2021, several civil society organizations in that South American country asked her to consider the impact of the sanctions against Chavismo, but without ignoring the context of state inefficiency, corruption, and political violence against all opposition.

In a public letter, they warned that the government was criminalizing the collaboration of independent organizations with United Nations mechanisms, “thus hindering the work of reporting.”

But the warnings fell on deaf ears. The final report on Venezuela was favorable to Nicolás Maduro. The rapporteur stated that the sanctions had “exacerbated the calamities of Venezuelans.” And yet, she failed to mention El Helicoide, the largest torture center in the Hemisphere, and the suffering endured there by hundreds of citizens during the long years of rule by the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

In 2024, something similar occurred after the academic’s 12-day visit to China. She called on the United States and other Western nations to lift the economic sanctions against the biggest fraudster in the global trading system.

“I wish to reiterate the illegality of the extraterritorial application of unilateral sanctions and call upon States, particularly those imposing them, to effectively address excessive noncompliance by companies and other entities under their jurisdiction in order to mitigate or completely eliminate any adverse humanitarian impacts,” Douhan commented at the end of her stay in the Asian country controlled by Xi Jinping’s communist regime.

In a report detailing the findings of her trip, she highlighted U.S. sanctions measures, reports National Review, in addition to the import restrictions passed by Congress to prohibit goods produced with forced Uyghur labor from entering the United States.

Given Douhan’s string of diplomatic achievements, the Trump administration’s reassessment of funding for agencies within the United Nations system doesn’t seem unjustified. Ultimately, the weakness of so many experts and academics appears to be sympathy for tyrants, and the U.N. Human Rights Council provides them with a convenient platform to visit and pat their bloodied fists.