It condemns abuses in Burma, Zimbabwe, China, Chechnya, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Israel- Palestine. But even with the US treatment of Guantanamo Bay detainees and Saudi Arabia's torture-based legal system treated gently, the double standards shine through.Indeed, some of the phrases in the review produce unintended echoes. But the effect of yesterday's report, the latest of the Government's dodgy dossiers, is to add weight to the questions Alastair Campbell asked himself in the run-up to war: Why Iraq? Why now?Overall, the document is a reasonable summary of the known human rights disaster zones around the world. They are real, despite the dislocations of the post-war disorder, and advocates for human rights ought to welcome them.

Jack Straw presumably hopes to soften criticism of the war - on which his own position remains ambiguous - by using yesterday's review to emphasise the human rights gains. In Afghanistan, as a by-product of the justified action against al-Qa'ida, human rights were also promoted.The difficult case is Iraq. It amounted to little more than a minor change in the wording of the guidelines on arms sales.Meanwhile, the real substance of an "ethical" foreign policy was dictated from Number 10 by Tony Blair, and it consisted of a muscular interventionism in defence of human rights In Kosovo and Sierra Leone, this was praiseworthy. The Government's annual review of human rights around the world carries on its cover a picture of Iraqi women in front of posters of the missing. For want of almost anything else, the situation in Iraq is central to Tony Blair's remaining pretensions to an ethical foreign policy. It was symbolic that on the cover of the first such review, in 1998, was a photograph of Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, shaking the blood-soaked hand of President Suharto, the soon-to-be-ex-dictator of Indonesia.That was an instance where the new Labour government, pledged to the ideal of "spreading the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves", got the age-old choice between engagement and isolation wrong.Mr Cook's mistake was to imply that policy would be radically more "ethical" than it was before, whereas much of the "new dimension" turned out to be rhetoric. In an attempt to distract from the indefensible, the Government is engaged in an act of petty spite against Jeffrey Archer, on the assumption that he is unpopular. Indeed, it may be many people's opinion that someone recently convicted of perjury is unsuitable to be a law-maker.

If so, a democratic test of membership of the second chamber would suffice.What the Government proposes breaks two of the fundamental principles of good law: that it should not be retrospective, and that it should not apply unfairly to an identifiable individual or group of people. Mr Blair is engaged in a populism more crass than any of Lord Archer's novels.. In proclaiming the freedom of the Iraqi people in its annual review of human rights around the world, the Government can only hope that this is enough to justify whatever compromises it decides to make. It was the proposal to change the law in order to ostracise one person. The result may not be a House of Cronies - that would be bad public relations - but the most that an independent appointments commission offers is a Convocation of Worthies.Yet the most outrageous aspect of yesterday's announcement was not this dismal retreat from democracy. The option that was most narrowly rejected, by just three votes, was that for an 80 per cent elected chamber.The slide from the "more representative and democratic" chamber promised in Labour's 2001 manifesto to the "stable and sustainable" one outlined by Lord Falconer yesterday reveals all we need to know about Mr Blair's conservatism.