NOBODY minds constructive and informed criticism but the latest salvo from the United Nations' ivory tower in Geneva is surely a parody.
To have the brutal dictatorship in North Korea - which uses famine as a form of population control - or Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation - criticised for running detention centres as little more than cramped prisons and giving most asylum seekers no legal rights - lecture us makes a mockery of this supposed international oversight. 
Like nations everywhere, Australia has confronted a growing problem with asylum seekers attempting to find refuge by following a well worn path through Indonesia and across the Indian Ocean or the Timor Sea to Australian territory.
Strong and determined usually bipartisan policy has seen what was a flood of people seeking asylum dry up. We have been left with an unacceptably high number in detention on Christmas Island or special centres on Nauru and Manus Island. But when compared with most refugee camps and detention centres, the facilities Australia manages have comfortable lodgings, access to food, education and health services.
Of course, things can always be improved and the Government is making every effort to process those in detention and reduce the numbers held in facilities. Recent events on Christmas Island, where some convicted criminals - most, oddly, from New Zealand - awaiting deportation are provoking unrest and violence, have not helped our image but such incidents occur from time to time.
Australia should perhaps think again about its prospective bid to join this UN body - the Human Rights Council - if the analysis and quality of its criticism is as weak and ill-informed as we have seen this week.Given the scale of the refugee issues confronting developed nations - not least the swamping of nations from Greece to Sweden with desperate souls fleeing the Syrian civil war - an organisation such as the UNHCR should have better things to do than target a country like Australia that was instrumental in drawing up the international refugee protocols and has, more than most other nations, been successful in dealing with what is a global and often intractable problem.