Who are they, what do they do, what don't they do ?
Quote:.......Of the HRC’s 47 member states, only 23 live up to Freedom House’s definition of “free” countries.
Fourteen qualify as “partly free” and ten are “not free,” with three of these—China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia—earning a spot in Freedom House’s special report The Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies.
China, Cuba, and Pakistan haven’t even ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the primary legally binding human rights instrument in international law.
The HRC has no legal authority.
It passes nonbinding resolutions on what it decides are human rights abuses and can only make recommendations to the General Assembly.
Nevertheless, its resolutions enjoy the UN imprimatur, and it can legitimize barbarities simply by ignoring them.
If a dictator can claim in the international media that the HRC has passed no resolutions against him, his job of maintaining the status quo and lobbying against intervention in his country’s affairs becomes that much easier.
Delegates to the General Assembly elect states to the HRC by secret ballot.
But since regional “groups,” like African states and Asian states, automatically get a set number of seats on the HRC, the upshot is that Islamic countries, together with non-Islamic members of the Non-Aligned Movement, always control about two-thirds of the seats.
As Roy Brown of the International Humanist and Ethical Union puts it: “Voting, when it does occur, invariably results in a two-to-one defeat for the Western liberal democracies.”..........
http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_UN-human-rights-council.html