My first instinct was to check the date: was it actually April 1st on Monday? On realising there was no mistake the second reaction was one of wonderment that anyone still takes the United Nations seriously.

The once respected organisation held its Universal Periodic Review in Geneva on Monday, and France didn’t fare well.

As a succession of shamelessly panjandrums slapped down France, its police were once more coming under sustained attack by hordes of anarchists and far-left extremists

Beacons of liberty lined up to trash the Republic for what they described as the heavy-handedness of its police in recent weeks. Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China expressed their grave anxiety about state repression. ‘We are concerned about the harsh and sometimes violent measures aimed at dispersing peaceful citizens,’ intoned Kristina Sukacheva, Russia’s representative on the UN Human Rights Council.

Tunisia also weighed in, lecturing France on its need to end racial violence and discrimination. This from the country whose president in March launched a tirade against Sub-Saharan immigrants, accusing them of ‘violence, crime and unacceptable practices’, and of attempting to turn Tunisia into ‘just another African country that doesn’t belong to the Arab and Islamic nations anymore.’

America’s Deputy Permanent Representative on the Human Rights Council, Kelly Billingsley, a graduate of the London School of Economics, told France to ‘expand efforts to counter crimes and threats of violence motivated by religious hatred such as anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim hate’.

Ms Billingsley’s ignorance does her a disservice. She neglected to mention the most persecuted religion in France: Christianity. In 2016 an elderly priest was murdered as he took Mass in his Normandy church and in 2020 three worshippers were butchered to death in Nice. Islamists carried out both attacks. The latest figures for religious-motivated crimes in France disclosed that in 2021 there were a total of 1,659 such acts: 857 classified as anti-Christian, 589 anti-Semitic and 213 anti-Muslim.

Meanwhile at the UN, China accused France of ‘racism and xenophobia’, and of implementing ‘measures that violate the rights of migrants’. The French representative presumably didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at criticism from a regime that has imprisoned more than one million Uyghurs and other minority groups since 2017 in brutal internment camps, subjecting them to ‘forced labour and forced sterilisations’.

Japan also entered into the hypocritical spirit of the occasion, lambasting France for its ‘racial profiling by security forces’. It was only a few weeks ago that Amnesty International accused Japan of subjecting migrants to ‘arbitrary, endless detention in prison-like immigration facilities’.

What made the UN Human Rights Council’s points-scoring all the more preposterous was its timing. As a succession of shamelessly self-righteous panjandrums slapped down France, its police were once more coming under sustained attack by hordes of anarchists and far-left extremists.

More than 400 police officers were injured in the line of duty during May Day rallies – including one who suffered severe burns when a Molotov Cocktail was thrown at his feet. Since the pension reform protests began turning violent in March, nearly 2,000 police officers have been injured. This is nothing out of the ordinary; attacks on the police have risen steeply since 2016.

Facts like these are routinely ignored by the left-wing western press; in their eyes the police are the provocateurs. Last month Le Monde ran an article headlined ‘French police’s aggressive crowd control runs counter to its European neighbours’. Its gist was that their boys in blue should be more benign, like their counterparts in the UK and Scandinavia. This might work if elements of the French far-left didn’t feel the urge to loot, burn and fight every time they took to the street.

The section of the French press that leans right has treated the UN report with disdain. Nevertheless, while criticism from China and Iran can easily be brushed aside, it rankles that American joined the pile on. But is it surprising? As the American historian Victor Davis Hanson suggested recently in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, Joe Biden is just a front for the most revolutionary left-wing administration in living memory.

Similarly, in recent years the United Nations has taken a sharp turn to the progressive left, embracing most of the radical policies that have emerged from the American universities this century. Its High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, has been critical of Italy and Britain this year for their attempts to stem the huge numbers of migrants illegally crossing their borders. Türk advocates what could best be described as an open borders policy, declaring in Geneva last month that ‘it would be far better for countries to provide safe and regular pathways for migration.’

France is increasingly in the sights of the UN because of its resistance to what they call ‘wokisme’. At the UN General Assembly last year France was the only western nation to object to the passing of a resolution proclaiming 15 March as the International Day to Combat Islamophobia. The French representative pointed out that Islamophobia ‘has no agreed definition in international law’ and argued that the creation of an international day ‘does not respond to concerns to counter all forms of discrimination’.

There are many influential figures on the French far-left who harbour a visceral hatred of the police; their dream is to follow Democrat-run cities in America and defund them. Only then will they achieve their cherished revolution. The UN’s report will encourage them to believe they have a powerful ally in Geneva.