The United Nations was created in 1945 to promote international security, social progress and human rights. More than 60 years later it has its impassioned defenders and critics so harsh that they want to have it abolished.

The decision by its Human Rights Council to praise the Sri Lankan Government over its war against the Tamil Tigers is the latest incident to raise questions about how effective the UN is.

The Human Rights Council is the replacement for the discredited Human Rights Commission, which once had Libya as a chairman. Yet the new council is little better and has human rights violators such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, China and Kyrgyzstan as members. They are naturally reluctant to accuse other nations of abusing citizens.

Their inclusion reflects how the UN admits nearly every recognised independent state — 192 in all — irrespective of their democratic or human rights record.

Critics say that the UN should be reformed or abolished because of its failure to stand up to dictators or the perpetrators of genocide. They point to its failure to halt the Rwandan genocide in 1994, to intervene in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, its obsession with criticising Israel and its failure to halt genocide in Sudan.

“It has been largely impotent on the major issues of our time,” said Anne Bayevsky, a UN expert at the Hudson Institute.

Some disagree. A study by the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, in 2005 found that the UN was successful on two out of three peacekeeping missions.

In the same year the Human Security Report, produced by the University of British Columbia, claimed that there had been a decline in the number of wars, genocides and human rights abuses since the end of the Cold War, and cited the UN as a significant factor.

The Bush Administration was hostile to the UN, although it used Security Council resolutions that were ignored by Saddam Hussein as a rationale for invading Iraq.

President Bush picked John Bolton, a UN sceptic, as his UN Ambassador. Mr Bolton had once said: “There are 38 floors to the UN building in New York. If you lost ten of them it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Yet when the Iraqi insurgency flourished, Mr Bush began to regret his hostility. When the US looked to other countries for help he realised too late that the UN had a role to play.

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