Is Report X flawless? No, so it must be “flawed”
What kind of flaws? The data collection procedure isn’t fully specified, and people who don’t like the conclusions have criticised the report
What can we conclude? Whatever beliefs we held in the first place don’t need revision, since evidence against them is invariably flawed

Posner’s comment here probably says more about himself than it does about the world of human rights observers.

The UN Human Rights Council is certainly an extremely politicised body and there is almost unanimous agreement amongst human rights activists that it is guilty of double-standards. The UN Human Rights Committee, the Special Rapporteurs and the other mechanisms are much more objective in their work. That does not mean you should not keep lobbying its members to take action on human rights issues – nor recognise that some good practice is emerging at this level (the Periodic Review Process, for example, has been quite useful at building constructive dialogue).

But both the UNGA and the Security Council are guilty of the same double-standards. In this they just reflect their members interests and that is just the way the world works. As far as I am aware the Security Council has never passed a resolution which the Israeli government has opposed, because it can rely on the US veto for support.

People who attack the UNHRC for its anti-Israel bias would have more of a point if they could show that they accepted the criticisms made by other parts of the UN human rights system which are widely agreeed to be credible. And proposals for reform of the Council – and the wider UN-based system of international law – also need to address the P5 vetos. Similarly, if the US and Israel were to sign up to the International Criminal Court then they would be showing that they were not afraid of judicial investigations into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been made against their forces. Although I have some criticisms of the ICC, there is no evidence that it will launch malicious or frivolous prosecutions.

What comes across in the general thrust of arguments like those of Eric Posner is just a knee-jerk support for Israel against any criticism on human rights grounds and a determined to malign anyone who dares raise an alternative viewpoint. The recent attacks on HRW and Amnesty from what I take to be his co-thinkers seem to have the same motivation and are actually self-defeating in their virulence and pettiness.

Assuming methodological individualism as a starting point (which I assume Posner would do in discussions of domestic political issues) that’s because the idea of “states’ interests” is incoherent, unless the state is a dictatorship or (relaxing the individualism assumption a bit) controlled by an oligarchy so tight that conflicts among its members can be disregarded on the international scene.

Some of the time (for example, in conflicts over claims to resources) the state might be regarded as a unitary agent for interests shared by the community as a whole.But, for human rights issues, the story is much more complicated.

With an independent dictatorship (Burma for example), the state does indeed have a clear interest in oppressing its subjects, and the only leverage against this is sanctions, such as aid withdrawal, imposed by the “international community”. So, a report doesn’t need to do much more than note the abuses and hope that the climate in which it is launched will favor a response.

But in a state that is at least partially democratic, or a client state of a democracy, human rights issues will be the subject of domestic dispute with the state (or its patron) and the reports of a human rights body will be used, and, inevitably, attacked as part of domestic politics. So, it makes sense to write reports of this kind in a way that will most embarrass the government concerned, ideally without going so far OTT as to lose credibility.