Australia has used its first session on the powerful UN human rights council to say it will promote and protect human rights across the globe, while conceding “no state has a perfect human rights record”.

Australia campaigned for a seat on the 47-country body, pitching itself as a “pragmatic and principled” candidate and a voice for the Pacific.

But it has been consistently criticised by UN human rights agencies over its asylum and refugee policies, in particular indefinite offshore detention, as well as persistent Indigenous disadvantage, juvenile justice and disability rights.

Lachlan Strahan, charge d’affaires of Australia’s mission to the UN in Geneva, gave the “incoming members’ pledge”.

Australia led 11 of the 13 new members of the council in the pledge, bringing together nations from across all five of the UN’s regional groupings: Afghanistan, Angola, Australia, Chile, Mexico, Nepal, Peru, Senegal, Slovakia, Spain, and the Ukraine.

“As incoming members of the human rights council, we are committed to the success and effectiveness of the council, and are convinced that the council plays an invaluable role in promoting and protecting human rights worldwide,” he said.

Australia pledged to “engage in the work of the council in a spirit of self-reflection, with a view to improving our own human rights situation, recognising that no state has a perfect human rights record”.

It also vowed “to make progress in the promotion, protection and realisation of human rights at the national level, including through implementation of recommendations and resolutions of the council”.

Many of the UN recommendations have not been adopted by Australia.

The UN’s committee on the elimination of racial discrimination wrote in December that it was “alarmed” at the continuation of offshore processing “despite the high number of corroborated reports on the desperate and dangerous conditions prevailing in those centres, in which persons, including children, experience severe human rights violations”.

The committee said it was “deeply concerned that Indigenous people continue to experience high levels of discrimination across all socio-economic indicators, including education, healthcare, employment and housing”. It said Australia needed to address Indigenous youth incarceration levels, schooling, housing and poverty.

The UN’s human rights commissioner said offshore processing represented an “unfolding humanitarian emergency” last year, and called on Australia to move all of those it had sent offshore back to Australia.

And the UN human rights committee told Australia it should lift the age of criminal responsibility from 10, and that the country should abolish the practice of forced sterilisation of women and girls with intellectual disabilities.

Daniel Webb, from the human rights law centre, observing the human rights council session in Geneva, said Australia’s well-intentioned pledge must be backed up by action.

“It’s important to hear our government promise to strengthen the UN system and to start respecting human rights findings,” he said. “The world will be a fairer and more humane place if we have a strong and effective international human rights system.

“But just saying over and over again that you respect human rights doesn’t make it true, not for the innocent human beings warehoused on Manus and Nauru for the last five years, or the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men, women and children being forced into prisons away from their families and communities at obscenely high rates.

“All of the people suffering injustice right now in our community need action, not just words.”

Webb said there were critical human rights abuses occurring now: the “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar; the chemical attacks targeting civilians in Syria’s eastern Ghouta; and attacks on political dissidents, journalists and human rights advocates across the world. The human rights council could be a powerful advocate for the protection of vulnerable people.

“Victims of cruelty and injustice all over the world desperately need governments like ours to be part of the UN’s principled spine, not a corrosive influence gnawing away at the very foundations of human rights with their own hollow words and unprincipled actions,” he said.