All eyes will be on America’s ambassador to Turtle Bay, John Bolton, when he takes the podium today to deliver a major speech on his vision for the new Human Rights Council now being considered as replacement for the discredited, nay, scandalous Human Rights Commission. Mr. Bolton’s ideas for a reformed human rights body are fine with us, at least as far as they go. But The Great Bolton is himself limited by the fact that the Bush administration has chosen, thus far at least, to play within the United Nations’ own rules.

The current commission has fallen into disrepute because its membership is dictated by a complex regional voting system that allowed America’s so-called friends – Sweden, Austria, and, of course, France – to vote us off the commission while Cuba, Zimbabwe, and the Sudan have been voted on. Libya even chaired the commission for a while. The absurdities became so obvious that even the U.N. leadership was coming around to the idea that some kind of change was needed.

Mr. Bolton has been spearheading an American effort to replace the current commission with something that would have a chance to do some good. He proposes a council that would include the five permanent members of the Security Council, as well as others who would be approved by a two-thirds vote of the United Nations’ 191 members. The theory is that including the “P-5” would guarantee perpetual American membership, while making the general assembly as a whole vote on the other members would make it impossible for rights abusers like Libya to hide behind their regional groupings.

Yet the plan has its drawbacks. Including the P-5 would provide a permanent seat on the council not only to France – whose own standing has been diminishing at home and abroad – but Russia and Communist China, which never had standing. A scholar at the Heritage Foundation, Joseph Loconte, recently told the Washington Post that it’s worth asking, if China and Russia are America’s admission ticket to the council, “is that the kind of organization we want to be committed to?”

Good question. Those who criticize the proposal on these grounds, including even the New York Times, have hit on a deeper weakness with the United Nations. It turns out to be a place in which paying more than a quarter of the United Nations’ budget and boasting an unparalleled record on human rights are not enough on their own to justify a place at the table for America. The best our permanent representative can do is to formulate a criterion that, as a side effect, drags China and Russia on America’s coat tails.

If Mr. Bolton succeeds, he will have created a rights watchdog that is more respectable and more effective than the current commission. He could hardly do otherwise. But while Mr. Bolton pursues reform at the United Nations, we can’t help but think that the Bush administration – which fundamentally understands the importance of spreading democracy and human rights – would do well to explore alternative means as well.

The history of reform of U.N. constituent parts – Unesco, for example, or the International Labor Organization – is that reform comes only when America actually leaves. It pulled out of Unesco under President Reagan and the ILO under President Carter. There’s no reason why it wouldn’t work for a Human Rights Commission, particularly were it coupled with the formation of a competing organization, a non-United Nations coalition of the willing on rights issues along the lines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on defense.

No one expects to hear that today from Ambassador Bolton who, although an extraordinarily committed and savvy man, is constrained by his post as America’s ambassador to the United Nations. But there are a lot of us who are hoping that his speech will be only the beginning of the struggle to force this issue within the world body – or without.