As the United Nations concludes its 75th birthday year, it is hard to be optimistic about the international body. Established for the cause of preserving peace and meaningful diplomacy, the U.N. was also supposed to be a guardian for human rights.

But judged against its founding charter, the U.N. isn’t just a failure. It is a sad joke.

On Jan. 1, China, Cuba, and Russia will become members of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Yes, China, which has imprisoned 2 million of its Uighur citizens in gulag reeducation camps, sterilized thousands, and used the rest for de facto slave labor, is donning the U.N. human rights mantle. Cuba, a dystopia tolerated by the Western media elite for its creaking art deco façade, sees many of its best and brightest choose to brave shark-infested waters in search of better lives. Vladimir Putin’s Russia wages a very thinly veiled war on all who question the Kremlin. Whether it's Novichok nerve agents and Alexei Navalny, open windows and journalists, or gang attacks on gays, Putin’s Russia despises human rights.

It is not simply alarming that these governments are joining the Human Rights Council, but that so few governments and organizations are bothered by it.

This is to be expected, of course. The Human Rights Council has a perpetual fetish for attacking the Middle East’s only truly pluralistic democracy, Israel, but has long been happy to ignore the far greater sins of others. Previous honorees of the Human Rights Council circuit include Venezuela. A nation blessed with the largest oil reserves of any nation on Earth and some of the highest child mortality rates on Earth.

A joke indeed. But not a funny one. This isn’t simply a question of human rights. It’s a question of life or death.

When one considers the genocidal tragedies that the U.N. has failed to address, a notable and ignominious trend becomes apparent. Namely, the U.N.’s utter failure to resolve these tragedies. Rwanda, Bosnia, and Syria are now sorry examples of the U.N.’s embarrassing inadequacy. More ominously for the world, the forces arrayed against the collective international community in each of those crisis scenarios were comparatively weak. To have prevented genocide, then, would not have required some extraordinary feat but rather the observation that the U.N. charter was being shredded and that a credible response was possible. Instead, either by inherent dysfunction of callous choice, the U.N. sat idle and accepted avoidable massacres and misery. No wonder that so few Uighur Muslims have any confidence that the U.N. will now take up their cause with energy. They rightly believe that the U.N. will choose to bend the knee in pursuit of new donations from the Chinese Communist Party. Beijing, after all, sees U.N. favor as a cheap and easy way to paper over its human rights atrocities.

But the challenges go beyond human rights. In the face of repeated and successively increasing Iranian breaches of nuclear arms agreements, the U.N. sits idle. In the face of escalating Chinese circumvention of North Korean sanctions, the U.N. sits idle. U.N. officials like to blame the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members for these issues. But the truth is that the U.N. itself is to blame. Its leaders, now and before, have failed to address the broken structures that sit at the heart of their organization. They should act. But they won’t. They’re happy instead to make speeches and then return to the extensive and expensive budgets afforded to all U.N. staffers. It is extraordinary, for example, that so much of the U.N.’s money continues to be spent in New York City and Geneva rather than out in the field where it might, just might, save lives and make the world a slightly better place.

The U.N. doesn’t deserve many birthday presents. Not this year, at least. And likely not next year.