When asked last week if U.N. Secretary-General Annan has any opinion on the deal allowing a Dubai-based company to manage New York ports, his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, used one word: “None.” Although Mr. Annan and his aides are no strangers to international kibitzing, they often recognize issues they might as well stay away from.

But in this case Mr. Annan had another reason to refrain from comment: two weeks ago Dubai’s ruler, Sheik Mohammed bin-Rashid al-Maktoum, gave the secretary-general a $500,000 environmental award. Criticizing or praising a country that just transferred a half million bucks to your bank account is never wise.

“The secretary-general is often given prize money,” Mr. Dujarric told me last week, after the story was first reported by Claudia Rosett in the Weekly Standard. “He has given every penny to charity, and he intends to do the same with this money.” Dubai’s Prince Zeid award would be used as seed money for a fund Mr. Annan intends to establish in Africa for promoting agriculture and girls’ education. No word about any interest that might be accumulated until then.

2001 was a good year for Mr. Annan. Beside the $487,000 he received from the Swedish Nobel committee, he was awarded the William Fulbright Prize for International Understanding ($50,000), the Philadelphia Liberty Medal ($100,000), and the Torstein Dales prize from the Red Cross, to name a few.

In 2003 he was in New Delhi for the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Development, and Disarmament, and in 2004 it was Brussels, where he was awarded the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. All, according to the U.N. spokesmen, went to charity.

But that was then. His image much tarnished, Mr. Annan has since declared he would use his last year in office to reform the United Nations. One success was establishing a new bureaucracy, known as the peace-building commission. Other reform attempts, like trying to update the Security Council, failed.

So did reform of the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission, known as a haven for violators like Zimbabwe, Cuba, and Sudan. Human rights violators and their allies have considerable power at Turtle Bay, and when the Swedish president of the General Assembly, Jan Eliasson, presented a compromise plan for a new Human Rights Council last week, their victory became clear. The new plan guarantees that the same faces that currently shame the commission would also be represented in the new council.

In at least one respect, Mr. Eliasson’s plan, which Mr. Annan urged everyone to approve quickly, worsens the situation: A proposed term limit, assures that all members, including America, serve on the new body for no longer than six years. Currently, half of all the resolutions the Human Rights Commission votes on each year concentrate on Israel (which, not coincidentally, is also the only U.N. member not allowed to participate in consultations in Geneva-based U.N. institutions).

Once America, Israel’s only real defender, is gone from the body, the new council will be free to dedicate all of its time for exposing wrongdoings in Israel. Soon enough it will turn on America as well.

“Mr. Annan called for radical surgery to revive the discredited Human Rights Commission, and now he offers to give two aspirins and wheel the patient back onto the street,” said the director of U.N. Watch, Hillel Neuer, who consistently exposes abuses of the United Nations’ human rights mantle in Geneva.

Once the reform debacle becomes clear, Mr. Annan will assign blame to member states. But had he concentrated first on internal management reforms of his own secretariat, as Americans have urged him to do, he might have had a claim to leadership by example.

Some of Mr. Annan’s defenders in Washington, who believe he really is dedicated to reform, highlight measures enacted by the American undersecretary-general for management, Christopher Burnham, which might one day change Turtle Bay’s corruption culture and its relaxed ethical attitudes. Most notably, Mr. Burnham noticed that staff members are allowed to receive gifts amounting to $10,000 a year, and quickly enacted a new rule that would lower that ceiling to $250.

According to the U.N. charter, however, staff rules do not apply to the secretary-general. So instead of leading by example, Mr. Annan is now half a million dollars richer. And if Dubai does anything wrong around the world, he will wisely refrain from criticizing it.