Freedom House is reporting a stir from within dead halls:
As the 61st session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights convenes this week in Geneva, a group of leaders of human rights and pro-democracy organizations has issued a call for action to the newly created UN Democracy Caucus. The caucus is mandated by the Community of Democracies (COD) process, a global coalition of over 100 democratic and democratizing nations committed to the promotion and strengthening of democracy and human rights.The group appealed in a letter to the foreign ministers of the Convening Group countries of the COD to ensure that the Democracy Caucus takes a lead role in Geneva in fully airing, examining, and forthrightly censuring some of the world's worst human rights violations. In particular, the caucus should address ongoing abuses in places such as Burma, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, and in Sudan's Darfur region, among others.
The Convening Group is composed of Chile, Czech Republic, India, Mali, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, South Africa, and the United States.
The United Nations is, today, only useful as an expedient political channel. Built on the concentrated foolishness of naifs and aristocrats who placed liberty and tyranny in parity, its charter was morally and philosophically flawed at the time of inception in 1946 and the transnational organization has since rotted to the core, standing as little more than a bastion of authoritarianism. At the same time democratic nations have no need for a pseudo-sovereign bureaucracy to conduct bilateral or collective business, dictatorships subvert all forums of good faith to their own ends. A democracy caucus cannot reform the United Nations but it can serve as a proper vessel of exodus from Secretariat.