Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe: are you laughing yet?

Listen carefully and you will hear regular appeals to "the international community" or to "the UN" or to "what the rest of the world thinks". These sort of appeals pop up when the speaker happens not to like some outcome produced by the democratic process here in Australia.

So the speaker might dislike some outcome having to do with rights, or with labour standards, or just about anything really. And rather than go through the hassles and hard work of actually changing the minds of some of his or her fellow citizens, this speaker appeals in some grandiose way to what "the international community thinks" as though that were self-evidently good and the end of the matter. Personally, I think a fairly large dose of scepticism is warranted.

Start with the UN itself. The old UN Commission on Human Rights was dismantled in June last year for being ineffective, biased, ridiculous: take your pick. In its place we have the UN Human Rights Council, with 47 member countries. And in its short lifespan it has already made nine resolutions criticising human rights abuses.

Sounds good, right? Well, not one of those resolutions was critical of Sudan (over Darfur), or Zimbabwe, or China, or anywhere, save Israel. Yes, Israel is the only country this new body has criticised (on nine separate occasions, no less) for rights abuses. Gee, nothing to be sceptical about in that.

How about the UN Commission on the Status of Women? At its 2007 annual conference, when surveying the plight of women around the entire world, what countries did it single out? Saudi Arabia, maybe, where women aren't allowed to drive and are liable to be stoned to death? Or big chunks of Africa? Or Afghanistan? Nope. Apparently the only country that warranted a resolution for violating women's rights was, wait for it, Israel.

Does scepticism really need to be made of sterner stuff?

Or how about this? The UN Commission on Sustainable Development, which is charged with economic development and the environment, just elected as its chairman Zimbabwe. Yes, Zimbabwe, which has annual inflation of more than 2,200 per cent and whose economy is contracting by more than 5 per cent a year.

Or what about the UN's Disarmament Commission? Iran was just elected to serve as vice-chairman, with Syria as rapporteur. Even George Orwell couldn't satirise that!

Oh, the countries on that above-mentioned UN Human Rights Council include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, Cuba, Angola, Azerbaijan and others whose advice on human rights might not strike you as terribly persuasive, which is no doubt why those people who don't like the outcomes of democratic politics here in Australia tend to phrase their appeals in vague, amorphous terms ("the international community") rather than in specifics ("here's what Robert Mugabe and the Baath party of Syria think about the proper level of treatment for women and minorities").

Need more examples of "interesting" countries on various agencies and bodies? Here are just a few. Committee on Information: China and Kazakhstan. World Food Program executive board: Sudan and Zimbabwe (for some reason North Korea missed out, despite its famine). International Labour Organisation Governing Body (the one lots of union officials like to appeal to): Saudi Arabia (that bastion of generous treatment to non-citizen workers).

Now, I know that some readers - those who have more than a passing acquaintance with the whole international law superstructure and who, one supposes, get the odd invitation to conferences across the world or are asked to serve in some paid role here or there - like to say that these examples are all on the political side of the UN. Forget all that, they'll say (well, at least if you get a few drinks into them). The real work, they assure you, takes place in the various treaty bodies, the groups of "experts" who report on the many human rights treaties in existence.

So, any room for scepticism there? I think that depends on whether you're a democrat at heart or you're more inclined towards aristocratic, philosopher-king, judicial-activism type of government.

You see, these treaty bodies are staffed with people making all sorts of highly debatable calls. To give but one example, does spanking infringe eternal, timeless human rights? The issue divides people who are smart, reasonable and nice. It should be left to the voters, full stop.

The body overseeing the Convention on the Rights of the Child disagrees. The experts think they have a pipeline to God on this one. They point to Article 19 and say it prohibits spanking. But this is pure poppycock. Remember, this convention had to be phrased in incredibly general, amorphous terms in order to get the world's Chinas and Egypts to sign up. So it said no such thing in explicit terms. If it had done so, no country save Sweden (and maybe New Zealand) would have signed up. But these "experts" use a souped-up interpretation-on-steroids power to foster a sort of rule by the democratically illegitimate.

It's a bit like really bad judicial activism, save that it takes place outside the glare of publicity. And when solid democratic countries ignore the views of these self-styled experts, that is characterised as being "against international human rights standards".

So it's either the politicised UN agencies and bodies or the preening, smug, "expert"-driven and highly democratically illegitimate treaty bodies that tell us what these indeterminate treaties mean: treaties that I should note were entered into in Australia under the prerogative power, meaning they never had to be passed through parliament and voted on by elected representatives.

I think we can be sceptical of both these things. If you randomly drew 100 names from the phone book, those people would be a better guide to how to draw the many debatable and contentious rights-respecting lines that need drawing than anything likely to emerge from the UN or "the international community".

Call me sceptical.