Kofi Annan is putting the last year of his rather chequered term as United Nations secretary-general to good use by pushing reforms to the UN's internal management and to its human rights machinery. But he has run into surprising opposition from the US to his proposal for a new Human Rights Council that now has the support, or acquiescence, of almost all the UN's other 190 member states. Unless this impasse is broken, there will be the sorry picture of the UN's discredited Commission on Human Rights starting its regular annual session in Geneva on Monday with no successor body approved.

Bizarrely, the US does not deny that the proposed council would be some improvement over the current commission on which such blatant human rights violators as Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe have sat. At present, countries often get on to the commission as the result of back-room deals inside the UN's regional groupings. Under the proposed reform, there could still be regional slates of candidates, but each would also have to win approval from at least 96 countries, an absolute majority of the UN membership. Nor could any government, once on the council, expect to escape or block peer scrutiny of its own record; the proposed council would sit for longer during the year than the commission to help it carry out "a universal periodic review" of every country.