A relatively young body with roots in an older institution, the UN Human Rights Council has enjoyed some success and continued to serve important positive goals, many of them not easily realized. However, the system has always had significant internal and external limitations and continues to be beset by many problems – some more serious than others, and others more imagined than real. In our own time, the rise of right-wing populist regimes around the world, the continuities and discontinuities of the challenge that this sort of populism has posed to multilateralism in global governance, the economic crises that recently beset many parts of the world leading to serious resource constraints among many of the States that contribute the most to the UN’s budget, and the on-and-off withdrawals of the US (one of the most powerful States in the world) from the Council amidst charges of selectivity, appear to have combined to produce heightened crisis within and about that body. What to do? Informed by the cross-fertilization of the author’s academic thought and practical experience at the UN, the article offers an analysis of the Council’s attainments (including its embrace of a broader and more inclusive agenda, upr reduction of selectivity, the reform of its system of appointing special procedure mandate holders, increase in the number of standing invitations issued by States to such mandate holders, and establishment of an effective sids/ldcs fund); discusses the problems that presently confront the Council (many of which have already been referred to above); and works out in some detail some of the ways in which these difficulties can be effectively ameliorated so as to enhance the Council’s performance in the near- to medium-term future.
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