"So far it's been enormously disappointing, and the opponents of human rights enforcement are running circles around the proponents," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

The council was created in a 170-4 vote of the General Assembly a year ago to replace the Human Rights Commission, which had been widely discredited for allowing participation by countries like Sudan, Libya and Zimbabwe that used membership to prevent scrutiny of their own records.

The commission was long a major embarrassment to the United Nations, with former Secretary-General Kofi Annan commenting that it "cast a shadow on the reputation of the U.N. system as a whole."

When the 47 members of the new council were elected last March, tighter entry requirements succeeded in keeping the most notorious rights abusers off the panel, and there was some hope of less politicized behavior.

But member countries from Africa and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an association of 57 states promoting Muslim solidarity, have dashed those hopes by voting as a bloc to stymie Western efforts to direct serious attention to situations like the killings, rapes and pillage in Sudan's Darfur region, which the United Nations has declared the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Instead, the council has focused its condemnation almost exclusively on Israel. It has passed eight resolutions against Israel, and has cited no other country for human rights violations.

The United States voted against creating the council last year on the basis that it was not a sufficient improvement over the commission. This past week, it decided for the second straight year not to seek membership on the panel, and Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, linked the decision to the council's focus on Israel.

"It spent the entire year slamming Israel," Burns told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday. He noted that the council had conducted formal hearings against Israel "but not against Burma and not against Zimbabwe and not against North Korea and not against Iran."

The new session is the fourth formal meeting in the last nine months, and an immediate issue attracting attention as a measure of the council's purposefulness is what it will do about an assessment mission to Darfur that was barred from entering Sudan last month. The options are to publish a factual report, publish a report with recommendations or take no action.

"What they do with the Sudan mission will be a bellwether for the future of the council," said Peter Splinter, the Amnesty International representative in Geneva. He indicated that he was not optimistic.

"Sudan took the floor last week and said they rejected the mission entirely, and they are going to have the backing of the Organization of the Islamic Conference," he said. "If the council ducks the situation in Darfur, that's not going to speak highly to its credibility."

In another potential blow to the council's effectiveness, a proposal is circulating that would do away with many of the council's 41 rapporteurs, the experts who produce sometimes graphic reports of abuses in individual countries. The proposal specifically ensures the continuation of the mission that monitors the Palestinian territories.

Despite the disappointment with the council's early performance, Splinter said that it was premature to give up on the panel because it was still setting up its rules and procedures. It is supposed to resolve these institutional matters by the first anniversary of its opening session, in mid-June.

"It's going through its adolescence, and it's awfully painful, but we have to get past it and see what we have in the end," he said.