The UN Declaration of Human Rights is so broad that I’m sure many of the rights it spells out are violated nearly every day in some way in every nation. How can all these rights be violations be investigated by a single Human Rights Council, or even ten Human Rights Councils?

As long as the majority of member nations in the UN are statist-type governments, from the outright tyrannies such as Zimbabwe to quasi-”open” centrally controlled states such as China, the individual will always be of much less value than the state to the political class running the state. This makes, for me, any pronoucements on human right from this body or anyone else at the UN pretty useless.

Does the UN Human Rights Council cause states to treat their citizens better than they otherwise would?

No. Every state on the planet gets to point with pride to the fact that its human rights record is so much better by council standards than that democracy run by those !@#$% Juice in Isreal.

I think that this is closer to our current legal system than you suspect, on both aspects. We can’t know for sure how many criminals get away, but it would be quite surprising to me if it wasn’t a majority, at least when we include all thefts and assaults. Even a fairly larger percentage of serious crimes such as murders are never solved. What moral we should draw from this I’ll leave for others to decide.

Can I take you to mean that it didn’t work in term of changing human rights abuses of various governments, but did work in terms of discovering and publishing said abuses?

Excuse me? Josef Stalin cared about human rights? Chiang Kai-shek cared about human rights? A cynic would say that the UHCR was set up for primarily the same reason that the UN itself was set up: all of the organizers saw it as a useful tool in achieving their own partisan political goals, whatever those goals might be.