American taxpayers fund the United Nations. American diplomats built it. This week, the Geneva-based group UN Watch released the most thorough accounting yet of who actually pays the salaries and shapes the verdicts of the U.N.’s human rights enforcers. The short answer: not the United States.

The 104-page dossier, “From Watchdogs to Ideologues,” surveys 13 of the UN’s 59 Special Rapporteurs — the formally autonomous specialists whose findings carry near-judicial weight at the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, Western foreign ministries, and across the global press. It documents not occasional ideological tilt but the wholesale capture of a Western-built institution by the regimes it was meant to constrain.