If this sounds like an exercise in universal justice, it is anything but. This setup ignores crucial differences between free and unfree countries. Unfree countries have no reliable mechanisms for policing their own human rights violations. Their citizens are at the mercy of governments which rule not by consent, but by force. It was to address that problem that the U.N. originally set up a human rights body, which–sadly but predictably, given the U.N. system–has been repeatedly captured and corrupted by the violators.

Genuinely free and democratic countries, notably the U.S., have built-in mechanisms for policing themselves. It does their citizens no service to officially involve in that process a U.N. club of foreign governments, especially when that club brings with it the agendas of such states as Libya, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia or Cuba. For that matter, under U.N. rules, any U.N. member state may weigh in on these “human rights” reports, whether a member of the Human Rights Council or not. Iran, for instance, is not a member of the Human Rights Council. Nonetheless, while murdering its own dissidents, executing homosexuals, and calling for a second Holocaust, Iran’s government has weighed in on U.N. “human rights” reviews of countries such as Norway and the Netherlands, advising them to combat xenophobia and strengthen their rules against Islamophobia (advice which a U.N. database shows has been, in both cases, meekly “accepted.”)