One of the primary reasons for the dismantling of the United Nations Human Rights Commission was the perception that the body had come to be dominated by human rights abusing states. We employ the Political Terror Scale (PTS) to test this proposition empirically and our analysis confirms this to be true. However, what we also find is that human rights abusing states have long served on the Commission, although this problem grew considerably worse at the end of the Cold War. We suggest that the United Nations should make better use of existing human rights data and we make three policy proposals. The first is that a state's human rights record (based on the PTS) should be used to determine eligibility for membership on the new Human Rights Council. The second is the manner in which the Council could rely on existing human rights data when it begins the task of "universal periodic review." The third idea proposes a much different conception of human rights, one that is based not only on a state's domestic operations, but what it does (or does not do) outside its borders as well.