UN Special Rapporteur found to be under China’s payroll: Read how OpIndia had flagged his anti-India bias and Islamic appeasement tendencies after the Pahalgam attack

A recent report of the UN Watch has accused the United Nations Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism, Ben Saul, of ideological bias and conflicts of interest. The report reveals that Saul has been receiving funding from the Chinese government. According to Sky News, the report of the Geneva-based group also states that Saul has an anti-Western and anti-Israel bias. It points out that Saul has condemned the killing of the terrorist leader Ayman Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri, who was a senior member of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. “He’s not supposed to be an activist; he’s supposed to be an academic. We’re supposed to see scholarship,” UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer said, speaking to Sky News. “The UN expert should be the first to oppose the Hamas terrorists, to oppose the Islamic regime in Iran, and Ben Saul seems to echo the Islamic regime in Iran and its terrorist proxies,” Neuer said. “U.N. special rapporteur Ben Saul claims to be an ‘independent’ expert. But how can you be independent while receiving $150,000 from China? He gives a free pass to Beijing — and instead attacks America, the West, and Israel.”— Hillel Neuer on @SkyNewsAust with @carolinemarcus pic.twitter.com/1h3ZKMjlIm— UN Watch (@UNWatch) June 24, 2026 Quoting from the report, Neuer said that Saul received a $150,000 from the Chinese Communist regime. He pointed out that Saul has not rebutted the contents of the report. Neuer named several UN experts, whose offices received funding from China. “He claims to be an independent expert. He is a law professor in Sydney and calls himself an independent expert. I want to know how he can be an independent expert when he is receiving $150,000 from the Chinese Communist Party? Let me be clear. No one is saying that it is going into his own pocket to buy a Ferrari, but it is going to his office. The same office, that has never condemned China for putting a million Uyghurs in camps under the pretext of counterterrorism, the very issue he is supposed to be an expert on”, Hillel Neuer stated to Sky News. He said that the UN Special Rapporteur on Coercive Measures, Alena Douhan, received $ 1.3 million for her office from Russia, China, and Qatar. He named another UN expert, George Katrougalos, who is the chair of the UN Human Rights Experts’ office, and said that his office received 100,000 dollars from China, the same year he attended an event in Athens to promote the book of Chinese President Xi Jinping. UN Watch has flagged several instances of UN ‘experts’ receiving dubious funding from governments like China, Qatar, Russia etc and peddling specific ideological interests in the name of Human Rights while ignoring acts of terrorism and plights of victims of Islamic terrorism. How Ben Saul and other United Nations Special Rapporteurs had tried to defame India and peddle a false Muslim victimhood after Pahalgam attack Notably, Saul was among the eight United Nations Special Rapporteurs who had issued a joint press statement expressing ‘concern’ over so-called human rights violations by Indian authorities in Jammu and Kashmir for their counter-terrorism measures after the ghastly Pahalgam attack. Opindia had reported how the UN Special condemned the terror attack but deemed India’s counter terrorism operations, including temporary media restrictions, internet shutdowns, and the blocking of 8,000 social media accounts, as ‘disproportionate’ and in violation of international human rights law. Describing India’s counterterrorism actions as “collective punishment”, the UN rapporteurs claimed that authorities arbitrarily demolished homes, businesses and properties of families linked to suspected terrorists without court orders or due process. After the UN Watch report, it makes sense why Ben Saul, who is supposed to condemn acts of terrorism, was criticising India for fighting back against Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. Somehow, the UN rapporteurs had also linked anti-illegal encroachment drives in Assam and Gujarat with the nationwide post-Pahalgam crackdown by authorities to argue that Muslims unrelated to terrorism were being targeted for sharing the same faith as the perpetrators of the Pahalgam attack. While Assam and Gujarat have witnessed crackdowns on illegal encroachments, mostly involving Islamists encroaching government land and erecting Mazars or dargahs there, and illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya occupying land, these anti-encroachment drives have been going on for more than a year. Although unrelated, the only demolition drive in Gujarat that came just days after the Pahalgam attack was to remove illegal structures in and around Chandola Lake by the government, a hub of illegal Bangladeshis, that also after the Gujarat High Court gave clearance for the action. In addition, the assertion that houses of ‘innocent Kashmiri civilians’ were demolished is also false. Houses were demolished by the authorities, but not those of innocent civilians. The authorities razed down houses of only proven terrorists. Terrorist Shahid Ahmed Kuttey’s Shopian residence, house of another active jihadi Zakir in Kulgam, house of Ahsan ul Haq Sheikh in Muran, Pulwama, who had also visited Pakistan in 2018 and infiltrated the valley earlier this year, house of Farooq Teewd,a who crossed into Pakistan in the early 90s and never returned, and houses of LeT jihadis Adil Hussain Thokar at Bijbehara, Anantnag, and Asif Sheikh at Tral, Pulwama, were demolished by the security forces using explosives. None of them were innocent or peace-loving ‘civilians’.