Following a twelve-day visit to China, a U.N. rapporteur funded by Beijing is calling on the U.S. and other Western countries to lift their sanctions targeting the country.

“I wish to reiterate the illegality of extraterritorial application of unilateral sanctions and I call on states, in particular sanctioning states, to effectively address over-compliance of businesses and other entities under their jurisdiction in order to mitigate or completely eliminate any adverse humanitarian impact,” said Alena Douhan, the rapporteur, during a press conference in Beijing last week.

In a report detailing the findings from her trip, she singled out U.S. sanctions measures, in addition to import restrictions that Congress passed to prohibit goods produced using Uyghur forced labor from entering the United States. Douhan wrote that any sanctions measures imposed without U.N. Security Council approval are illegal under international law. She also questioned the legality of a sweeping list of other U.S. national-security tools, including export-control blacklists and the designation of Chinese military-linked research institutes.

Douhan, a professor at Belarusian State University, is the U.N.’s special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures. That position was created by a bloc of countries led by Iran via the U.N. Human Rights Council, with the goal of pushing for an end to Western sanctions imposed on dictatorships for their human-rights violations and other misbehavior.

There’s bipartisan agreement in Washington that Douhan’s position is a fundamentally illegitimate instrument of foreign dictatorships who want to bring about the removal of all foreign sanctions designed to punish their abuses. The State Department has said that U.S. diplomats vote against renewing the job every time it comes up at the Human Rights Council.

“Ms. Douhan and her sham work are exactly why I requested a report on UN Special Rapporteurs,” Idaho senator Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told National Review. “These positions are being abused by China and Russia who use the cover of the UN name to try to attack the United States. It shows how hollow the UN really is.”

Throughout Douhan’s time as special rapporteur, a part-time post, China and Russia have each earmarked special funding for her office. The people serving in rapporteur positions do not express the official view of the U.N. and receive a minimal amount of funding, though their statements benefit from the institution’s authority.

Last year, Douhan’s office received $200,000 in funding from China, according to an annual report released by the U.N.’s human-rights office.

During her trip to China, she met with Chinese officials in Beijing and made stops in Shenzhen, Changji, and the Xinjiang region.

In addition to backing Beijing’s complaints about U.S. sanctions, Douhan’s comments provide cover for the Chinese government’s denials that Beijing is carrying out widespread abuses against ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.

While the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights has expressed concern that the Chinese Communist Party’s policies toward Uyghurs and other minorities might be crimes against humanity, Douhan addressed the abuses only in passing — by endorsing the Chinese Communist Party’s stance against the U.S. human-rights sanctions.

In an interview with the Global Times, a CCP English-language propaganda outlet, Douhan reprised Beijing’s line that minorities in Xinjiang are hurt by Western sanctions because they disrupt China’s programs to lift them out of poverty.

For years, Beijing has described its campaign of forced sterilizations, forced labor, arbitrary detention, and torture as a legitimate poverty-reduction effort. Now, at least one figure affiliated with the U.N. is pushing that propaganda line too.