While it’s too early to predict how the uprisings against the corrupt Arab dictatorships will end, the millions of Arab and Islamic voices calling for human rights and democracy are finally being heard. From Tunisia and Libya to Egypt, Syria, and Yemen, citizens who have been silenced and threatened into submission for decades are demanding freedom.

These mass demonstrations and protests stand out in stark contrast to years of almost total silence on the part of the international “human rights community” regarding the chronic abuses in the Middle East. While the world’s highest concentration of regimes that abuse human rights is located in this region, the various international “watchdog” groups have shown very little interest in exposing these crimes.

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has been dominated by Libya, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and their allies, thereby preventing any serious discussion or action to help their own citizens. In parallel, groups such as Amnesty International, as well as Canadian groups claiming to promote human rights produce occasional, mildly worded rebukes, but have avoided serious confrontation or sustained campaigns.

Instead, most of these groups have immorally targeted Israel. Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has a Toronto branch, even lauded the Gadhafi family as “reformers,” and went to Saudi Arabia, not to protest the lack of freedom there for women or minorities, but to raise money to promote the infamous Goldstone report, immorally and falsely seeking to label Israel as a nation of “war criminals.”

The recent uprisings throughout the Arab world, in addition to demanding changes on the ground, exposed the bankruptcy of the international human rights establishment. The demonstrations in Libya, Egypt, Yemen and elsewhere are front page news, and these groups have been forced to respond.

In place of their obsession with Israel, they’re now actually examining the daily abuses in these closed societies. During the protests in Egypt, researchers and activists working for Amnesty and HRW, along with a number of journalists, were harassed and arrested by government officials.

For this important development to go beyond a temporary response and lead to a major and sustained shift in the agendas of these organizations, important structural changes are necessary.

Powerful NGOs such as Amnesty International must move quickly to remove ideologues and charlatans, who, among other anti-human rights activities, have campaigned on behalf of an admitted Hezbollah spy and expelled human rights advocates who questioned Amnesty’s affiliation with alleged Taliban supporters.

Similarly, the ideological heads of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa division, who are partisan anti-Israeli ideologues, need to be replaced by moral advocates of universal human rights.

Last year, HRW founder Robert Bernstein broke with his own organization, which had abandoned the critical moral distinction between democratic societies and closed societies. In reference to the Arab and Iranian regimes, Bernstein notes, “The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.”

Instead of heeding Bernstein’s well-founded criticism, HRW’s cynical power brokers sought to discredit their founder, heaping abuse on someone who has done far more to promote human rights than any of them. As a result, the biased agenda that largely ignored, and in some cases provided support to, Gadhafi and other Arab tyrants continued.

At the United Nations, the UNHRC is unlikely to change in any sustained and meaningful sense as long as the Islamic bloc and other anti-democratic regimes control its agenda. This coalition cannot be expected to voluntarily leave the council or accept the changes necessary to restore the principles of universal human rights.

As a result, the world’s democracies need to divorce themselves from the hijacked activities and allegations emanating from the UNHRC and clearly expose this farce by refusing to take part in any more sessions. Independent of the UN, democratic governments must hold repressive regimes accountable, not withstanding their oil production.

These steps would help at least begin the long-overdue process of restoring the frameworks meant to protect universal human rights.