Yesterday Amnesty International issued its annual report. Governments, it said, should hang their heads in shame in this, the 60th anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights. So they should, the democracies among them, for not doing more to insist on respect for its core principles.

Amnesty, however, which was founded to pester governments to release prisoners of conscience, has become a less impressive organisation since it neglected its own core principle, and made all the ills of the world its province. A report that accuses 77 states of suppressing freedom of speech, at least 54 of denying citizens a fair trial and 81 of torture or mistreatment devalues that roll call of dishonour by singling out the United States for criticism. Amnesty had much greater influence on the treatment of political prisoners when it concentrated on that alone.

The Burmese junta, with impeccable timing, chose this week to drive that message home. In yet another two-fingered salute to the UN, the generals extended for a further year the house arrest of Asia's most distinguished symbol of human rights denied, Aung San Suu Kyi. As Burma's generals cynically calculated, the world muffled its outrage for fear of snapping the exiguous lifeline to the survivors of Cyclone Nargis.

Burma is an extreme but by no means only example of the “humanitarian trap” - the leverage that foul regimes have over outsiders attempting to alleviate the suffering they inflict, or intensify through deliberate, callous neglect. Burma is not the only example of the UN Secretary-General being reduced to pleading with dictators because the Security Council is deadlocked. The impunity of some of the world's worst governments from international sanction is guaranteed not only by such powerful authoritarian patrons as Russia or China but also, from the other end of the spectrum, by bien pensant worthies who insist that without Security Council sanction nothing can “legitimately” be done.

Rigid adherence to the UN rulebook ducks first-order issues about when the use of force is permissible and what to do when justice points one way, the Security Council another (or is blocked even from discussing the issue) and action is urgent. In the name of respect for the rule of law, democracies end up betraying their core beliefs, reflected in the preamble to the UN Charter, about “the dignity and worth of the human person”. Without a greater willingness by law-abiding states to overcome such sterile legalism, the rule of law risks becoming little more than a hollow slogan. There may not be firm legal criteria for intervening in the internal affairs of states, but a body of custom has weakened the taboo against it, gradually modifying the concept of national sovereignty.

The question is how best to build on that to establish new touchstones for international legitimacy - and whether it can be possible to do so within the UN. The UN practice of voting in regional blocs results in a majority of governments banding together to oppose the setting of precedents that, they claim to fear, would give far too much freedom of manoeuvre to those few states able to enforce international standards of conduct.

By those “few” states, they of course mean the United States. No one expects decisive action from the EU. Had the Mirage landed its lifesaving cargo in the Irrawaddy delta as Bernard Kouchner bravely announced that it would, instead of quietly slipping away to offload it in Thailand, that would have sprung open the humanitarian trap.

This was a moment when the US, its warships lying offshore, needed an ally to act first. France has been known to bend international rules; its sad failure to do so this time will have been marked with particular attention by two men: Barack Obama and John McCain. It bodes ill for the latest American “big idea”.

Persistently advocated by Mr McCain and more recently by Mr Obama, this big idea is to muster a “concert” of democracies prepared to join forces at the UN and also, when vetoes or institutional incompetence paralyse the UN, outside it.

This is just the sort of liberal internationalism that turns Europeans pale. The irrepressible idealism of the US is, frankly, a confounded nuisance. They argue that it has been tried before, and failed, and they are right: in 2000 the Clinton Administration had a shot at creating a democratic caucus at the UN. It still exists on paper, but is handicapped by the inclusion of the likes of Azerbaijan and Egypt, not exactly model democracies. Trying again with tougher admission criteria could raise a lot of hackles. Not only that, mutters Whitehall, but it would be folly to make relations with Russia and China tenser than they already are. Why, it could even encourage them to set up a “black hats” club of their own, in a muted rerun of the Cold War. Don't, whatever you do, make Hitler angry. If Nato did not exist and that was America's big idea today, one wonders what reception it would get.

This is odd. Europeans have spent most of this decade moaning about the unilateralism of the Bush Administration, only to throw a fit when Goliath gently lowers himself to the ground and hands out ropes that could be used to tie him down. This is not just an invitation they would be unwise to refuse. It is an idea that returns to the Declaration's concept of a “common standard” of respect for the freedom of others, the core of democratic beliefs. It could rejuvenate the UN and, if that is impossible, then for the first time there would be a plausibly legitimate alternative channel for collective action. This may be an idea whose time has come. World-weary Europe has nothing on offer to match it.

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