When President Bush dedicated his United Nations speech to the virtues of democracy last week he might as well have been the ambassador from Mars.

The U.N. is built on the idea of expanding to the whole world principles that in essence are similar to the American Constitution. The charter even begins with “We the Peoples…” But many of the members, including some of the most powerful, represent the type of regimes that these principles stand for erasing. The result: The inmates run the asylum.

Mela Malin, known to her television viewers as Meichen Li, was born in China, where she was raised on the tenets espoused by its rulers: communism, atheism, and Mao’s Little Red Book. Then she came to America and was exposed to other ideas, which she now likes better.

She is a reporter with New Tang Dynasty Television, a New York-based independent satellite broadcaster in the Chinese language with Falun Gong sensibilities. For 24 hours a day, it broadcasts news and entertainment both in Mandarin and Cantonese not only here in America (Channel 30 in Manhattan) but also in Asia, Europe, and Australia. It covers topics that the communist-run press rarely or never does: SARS, AIDS in China, human rights abuses, and Falun Gong’s struggle for religious freedom.

Last year, the United Nations refused to grant credentials to Ms. Malin, who wanted to cover a United Nations human rights gathering in Geneva. Attempts to get a pass into Turtle Bay headquarters were blocked by the type of bureaucracy that even here seems a bit over the top. “Our reporters cover the State Department, we travel with Bush. I don’t know why I can’t get credentials to the U.N.,” she told me recently.

Last week, she finally received her U.N. press pass, for which she is grateful. Unlike most other reporters here, who have to renew their passes every six or 12 months, hers lasts for only three months. The way she was treated so far led some to suspect that renewal of that pass depends on the way she covers China.

A week after even the satellite-transmitted image of Taiwan’s elected president was not allowed in the building, it isn’t difficult to recognize the fingerprints behind this affair. Intent on controlling information flow to Chinese speakers around the world, Beijing pressures U.N. higher-ups, who are too scared to confront such a powerful member state or have personal aspirations to high positions that a provoked China might block by using its veto power.

How is it that China can prevent reporters from covering news in Midtown Manhattan? The answer is that nobody has told Beijing that at least here it should practice the democratic principles of the U.N. charter.

A system based on regional coalitions and interest groups that send delegates to represent them at policy decision-making centers is the essence of democratic politics. At the U.N., however, the largest such coalitions are composed of nondemocracies, which is why Sudan, a flagrant human rights violator, is assured a seat on the Human Rights Commission, along with every other violator.

The same bloc of tyrannies that can get automatic majorities in U.N. votes has made the General Assembly – and by proxy all other U.N. organs – so discredited on its Israel-related votes that it has become totally irrelevant to the disputes of the Middle East. Why should the citizens of democratic Israel take seriously any of its endless sermonizing?

Reform was in the air here. It always is when world leaders gather here for their annual General Assembly meeting. Yes, it’s high time that wealthy nations like Japan and Germany, who are among the highest contributors to the U.N.’s budget, as well as Brazil and India, who are influential in their regional spheres, get permanent spots on the Security Council. And why should Africa not have a seat while Western Europe has two?

Why, in other words, should the United Nations continue to reflect the world’s power structure as it was 60 years ago? For now, that is what reformers concentrate on. “We have to think about democracies not only within nations but also among nations,” Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim told me.

That presumes that an assembly of nations can function democratically even as its parts are not. Can it? And if not democratically, should it function at all?

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