Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe: are you laughing yet?

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.