Next Monday will be a busy day at Turtle Bay as the General Assembly meets for its first ever special session on Nazi crimes and as the Security Council determines whether genocide is occurring in Sudan’s Darfur region.

Announcing the special session commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps, Secretary-General Annan said last week: “The United Nations was founded as the world was learning the full horror of the camps, and is dedicated to doing everything in its power to protect human dignity and prevent any such horror from happening again.”

Referring to Darfur, the frustrated Human Rights Watch executive director, Kenneth Roth, said last week: “Stop making a mockery of the vow ‘never again.'”

Though the U.N. was indeed founded as a reaction to Nazism, its first ever event dedicated to the holocaust was 60 years in the making. By comparison, the General Assembly annually commemorates its own November 29, 1947, resolution, which called for the establishment of two states in mandatory Palestine, by conducting a solemn day of “solidarity” with those who vehemently opposed that resolution and still call it their “nakba”- the closest Arabic word to Holocaust.

Some member states who do not take kindly to seeing Jews as victims predictably tried to prevent next week’s event at the assembly, where gathering the necessary majority of 96 votes took months. And although Algerian Ambassador Abdallah Baali told me that “nobody can be against this,” nearly one third of the members still refuse to support the commemoration.

But it will take place, and Mr. Annan, the foreign ministers of Israel, Germany, and Poland, Nobel laureates like Elie Wiesel, and other dignitaries will say what needs to be said in a world where Prince Harry might become king. Some ambassadors, though, may highlight the plight of Palestinian Arabs, and others will protest, as Mr. Annan often does, that one should never confuse legitimate criticism of Israeli policies with Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

The U.N. Charter, as well as other treaties commonly referred to as “international law,” is written with the Nazis in mind. But Sudan’s membership in the 53-member human rights commission, which by now has become infamous as a shelter for human rights violators, only highlights how far the U.N. has strayed from its original lofty goals.

Mr. Roth had to admit recently that none of the tools created since the Holocaust by supporters of the ideal of international cooperation were working in the case of Sudan. With hundreds of thousand dead and an additional 10,000 deaths a month, the U.N. so far has delivered little more than promises, and what relief coordinator Jan Egeland recently defined as the “plaster” solution for Darfur.

The Security Council, the international equivalent of the executive branch, will do little for Darfur beyond rhetoric, although a north-south agreement has recently been reached. The fast-growing economy of veto-wielding China is the world’s most oil-starved country. Its business partner, oil-rich Sudan, will cynically be protected from any serious measures impressing on its new government that the world will not stand for what Secretary of State Powell called genocide.

By next Monday, the five-member committee headed by Antonio Cassese, which Mr. Annan dispatched to Darfur to determine whether what is occurring is indeed genocide, will deliver its verdict to the council. Even if the committee affirms Mr. Powell’s verdict, according to Mr. Roth, automatic punitive actions specified in the genocide treaty are unlikely to be implemented.

Traditional U.N. tools have been rendered useless, but Mr. Roth believes a new one, the International Criminal Court for war crimes, will deliver. Prosecution in The Hague, he says, is the only thing Khartoum politicians really dread. Not surprisingly, however, the carnage in another part of Africa, Congo, continues unabated after the ICC took up cases there.

The ICC is also vehemently opposed by the Bush administration for fear it would quickly turn into a political tool to stop America from acting around the world (including in Sudan, where American military involvement is the only real hope). Washington has a point, as was demonstrated in the recent political abuse of another Hague-based court, the International Court of Justice, against Israel’s defensive barrier.

And so, watch for the Sudanese ambassador, a member in good standing, as the world body solemnly vows that the Holocaust – and atrocities like Cambodia, Rwanda, Congo, Tibet, North Korea, et al – will “never again” be allowed to take place.

Mr. Avni covers the United Nations for The New York Sun. He can be reached at bavni@nysun.com.