Exclusionary Expertise: Tracing Racial Bias in the Appointment of the UN Special Procedures’ Mandate Holders

International organizations (IOs) have a keen interest in depoliticizing and scientizing their decision-making to justify their authority. One strategy to achieve this goal is to assert and claim neutral and technical expertise. Besides in-house expertise, IOs rely on individuals who serve as external and independent experts. The selection of such experts is expected to be neutral and based solely on the individual candidates’ issue-specific knowledge and experience. However, the production of expertise is not a technical but a social process in which IOs as ‘epistemic arbiters’ decide how to address transnational problems and who is privileged to address them. Typically, experts are attributed as ‘neutral’, ‘impartial’, ‘science-based’, or ‘objective’. We argue that such attributions are themselves far from neutral. Certifications of expertise by IOs are particularly prone to racial biases, which may affect the selection of experts by privileging candidates who conform to different markers of Whiteness. We test our expectations against the selection of experts for the United Nations’ Human Rights Special Procedures (UNSP). The UNSP are independent experts tasked with monitoring and reporting on human rights issues globally, concerning either specific issues or countries. The selection process for these positions involves interviewing and shortlisting by a Consultative Group of the Human Rights Council and final appointment by the Human Rights Council President. The UNSP selection process provides a compelling context for a nuanced analysis of how racial biases might influence the appointment of experts in a setting that ostensibly prioritizes impartiality and equality. In a first step, we leverage individual-level data on candidates for UNSP mandates from 2010 to 2023, analyzing all three stages of the selection process. The findings from conditional logistic regressions and survey experiments indicate that racial bias occurs, particularly in mandates that align with Western interests and values. Furthermore, the results highlight that non-White women are systematically marginalized in the appointment of UNSP mandate holders.