Thanks to a linguistic quirk, representatives from Qatar and Syria here at the loftily named Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room have ended up seated next to each other, where delegates are placed alphabetically according to their countries’ French names. Looking at these ultra-chic, impeccably polite diplomats at the Palace of Nations, you wouldn’t know that their respective regimes are two of the Middle East’s most bitter foes.

And that wasn’t the biggest charade afoot last week at the United Nations Human Rights Council. On Friday, it was Iran’s turn to undergo its Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, a process that invites all member states to judge each other’s rights records.

The North Koreans praised the ayatollahs for making “commendable achievements in the field of political, economic, social and cultural rights,” and they urged Tehran to “continue adequate measures for addressing the special needs of women and protecting children from violence” and to “make continued efforts to improve the social security system.”

The Syrians commended Tehran for “the adoption of new law and regulations” that allegedly promote human rights. Sudan “warmly welcomed” Iran’s human-rights progress in the face of international sanctions. Zimbabwe hailed Iran’s adoption of human-rights-friendly textbooks. All this during a week when Iran executed Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year-old woman convicted in 2007 for killing an Iranian intelligence officer who she said had attempted to rape her.

Welcome to the crown jewel of the U.N. human-rights system. Established in 2006, the Human Rights Council was supposed to be an improvement over its predecessor, the Human Rights Commission. That earlier body had devolved into a dictators’ mutual-praise society that spent most of its time bashing Israel. The nadir came in 2003, when Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya assumed its presidency.

In 2005, then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan launched a reform effort to remedy what he called the “declining credibility” of the commission, and thus was born the 47-seat Human Rights Council. To land a seat, states now had to win an absolute majority of votes among all members, rather than merely the support of their own regional group, as was the case under the old commission.

But no reform, it turns out, could fix the problem at the heart of the previous commission’s failure and now dogs the current council: the fundamental dissonance between the U.S. and its democratic allies, on the one hand, and the illiberal states that dominate most U.N. bodies, on the other. China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia were elected to the inaugural council by a majority of U.N. member states. The Bush administration, spotting the impending train wreck, declined to run for a seat.

Signs of improvement are still hard to find despite the Obama administration’s own noisy six-year engagement with the council. Of the 47 current members of the council, 23 are classified as unfree or partly free by Freedom House. These include some of the world’s most repressive regimes, such as China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam. Meanwhile, Israel remains the only country to be subject to a permanent agenda item, and more than half of the council’s country-specific resolutions and condemnations are directed at the Jewish state, according to U.N. Watch, a Geneva-based civil-society group.

At Iran’s UPR, the world’s authoritarians offered thousands of words of praise for their brother dictators in Tehran: “Belarus notes with satisfaction the practical steps taken to protect women’s and children’s rights.” Criticism from the U.S., Israel and some European states offered the occasional break from this dictatorial backslapping. But all states “welcomed the participation” of the Iranian delegation. In Geneva, everyone is perpetually “encouraged by progress,” and everyone gets a medal for showing up.

Leading the Iranian delegation was Mohammad Javad Larijani, secretary of the country’s own Human Rights Council. The UC-Berkeley graduate is best known for using a racial epithet to describe Mr. Obama. “Today this [the Persian equivalent of the n-word] talks of regime change in Iran,” Mr. Larijani said in 2010. He later clarified: “I am not a racist, but I must respond to this man in some way.”

In Geneva, Mr. Larijani responded to criticism of Iran’s treatment of its Baha’i minority. The Baha’i, he said, “have professors at university, they have students at university.” Yet a 1991 edict bars Baha’i from the country’s postsecondary institutions. To his credit, Mr. Larijani didn’t deny the fact that the legal age of marriage for girls in the Islamic Republic is 9. Instead, he lamented that some young Iranian women are marrying as late as in their 20s and 30s. He added: “My recommendation to my daughters are get married at least around 20 years old.”

Mr. Larijani also washed the Iranian regime’s hands of Ms. Jabbari’s execution. “The judiciary is not in a position to execute,” he said, but merely carried out the murder-victim’s family members’ private right to avenge their loved one’s death. The Iranian judiciary, he added, had attempted to dissuade the victim’s heirs from exercising this right and may have succeeded but for the international “media blitz” surrounding the case.

As for the regime’s oppression of gays and lesbians, Mr. Larijani said: “We do not accept imposing a special lifestyle under the banner of human rights. Universality should be promoted by a kind of multicultural mechanism.” The Universal Periodic Review, Mr. Larijani concluded, “is a fantastic place,” and judging by his beaming smile at the end of the event, the Iranian meant it. The question is how the cause of human rights is served by America’s legitimating presence as the world’s despots rub shoulders and sip tea together.