Andres Oppenheimer

The United Nations Human Rights Commission, which opened its annual session in Geneva, Switzerland, last week, has become such a joke -- thanks to members such as Cuba, China and, yes, the United States -- that it may be time to dissolve it and put an independent agency in its place.

Leading international human rights groups agree that the 53-member U.N. commission has been virtually taken over by the world's worst dictatorships, which have formed a mutual protection club that blocks any serious investigation into any of their peers.

''The U.N. Commission on Human Rights must reform itself, or risk irrelevance,'' Amnesty International said in a statement last week. Human Rights Watch called on the commission to "gain some of the credibility it has lost in recent years.''

The U.N. body's most obvious flaw is that some of its most active members are representatives of some of the world's worst human rights offenders.

While most democratic U.N. member countries don't care much about sitting on the Human Rights Commission, dictatorships such as Cuba, China and Zimbabwe go out of their way to become members and stop any investigations into their own abuses. Last year, the commission was chaired by Libya.

''The foxes are in charge of the chicken coop,'' says José Miguel Vivanco, a regional director with Human Rights Watch. ``The world's worst human rights violators protect themselves, and one another. They act like a true mafia.''

POLITICS, ECONOMICS

But it's not just a problem of the commission's membership. Because the commission is made up of governments -- and not independent experts -- even pro-human rights countries such as the United States and European and Latin American nations often cast votes based on political or economic considerations that don't have anything to do with human rights.

Consider:

• Argentina, which used to vote to condemn Cuba's human rights abuses, announced last week that it will abstain this year. The announcement came only days after international human rights groups declared that Cuba's violations reached a new high last year, with the execution of three people who were trying to flee the island on a hijacked boat, and the imprisonment of 75 peaceful dissidents.

According to Amnesty, Cuba has the largest number of political prisoners in the hemisphere, and perhaps the largest in the world on a per capita basis. Reporters Without Borders just called Cuba "the biggest prison for journalists in the world.''

• Neither the United States nor the 15 members of the European Union have so far supported a resolution condemning China's human rights abuses, despite a continuation -- if not a worsening -- of rights violations there, rights groups say.

While China is moving swiftly toward capitalism, its human rights record is appalling. Tens of thousands of people continue to be in jail for peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression, and factories use large numbers of children who work in virtual slavery conditions.

• The United States and Britain have joined dictatorships such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in resisting the idea of creating a special monitor to look into possible abuses in the war on terrorism, human rights groups say. Among the possible subjects of investigation would be Islamic prisoners at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

A CALL FOR 'REFORM'

What should be done? Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other major monitoring groups are calling for a ''reform'' of the U.N. commission, but I'm afraid that would be useless.

As long as the U.N. Commission depends on government votes, even its most democratic and well-meaning members will protect their friends and try to punish their foes.

Instead, the United States and other countries that see themselves as defenders of human rights should press the United Nations to abolish the commission, and replace it with a committee of independent experts selected for their personal credentials, who could serve five-year terms with no re-election.

The model already exists: the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, and the Organization of American States' Human Rights Commission in Washington, D.C., have gained international credibility precisely because they are made up of independent experts who investigate countries' abuses and report them. It's time for the United Nations to follow suit.