For a United Nations official to discuss reform of the international system is rather like an Englishman talking about the weather -- we do it all the time, it is a staple of daily conversation, but it seems that real change is always a little over the horizon.
In fact, United Nations reform has a long pedigree. The UN was founded in 1945, and the first discussions of reform began in 1948. And these discussions have continued in fits and starts ever since.
When Kofi Annan was elected SG in 1997 he embarked upon a major process of reform that was widely applauded within the UN Secretariat and by Member States. But at the time he was wise enough to say that “reform is a process, not an event.”
And that it is. Some reforms are revolutionary, but most come by increments, and are only truly visible over time. As a long-time UN official I am conscious of how much the United Nations has already changed since I joined the organization some 27 years ago.
If I had suggested to my seniors at that time that the UN would one day observe and even run elections in sovereign states, conduct intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, impose comprehensive sanctions on the entire import-export trade of a Member State, or set up international criminal tribunals and coerce governments into handing over their citizens to be tried by foreigners under international law, I am sure they would have told me that I simply did not understand what the United Nations was all about.
And yet the UN has done every one of those things during the last two decades, and more: it has administered territory, conducted huge multi-dimensional peace-keeping operations with nearly 80,000 soldiers in the field at one time, deployed human rights monitors to report on the behaviour of sovereign governments.
The United Nations, in short, has been a highly adaptable institution that has evolved in response to changing times. And we are now in the throws of another round of change.
The current reform imperatives, that more than 150 Heads of State and Government faced at a World Summit at UN Headquarters in September 2005, can be traced back to the divisions over the Iraq war.
In the summer of 2003, a poll conducted by the Pew Organization in 20 countries around the world revealed that the UN’s standing had gone down in all 20. It had gone down in the US because the UN did not agree to support the US Administration on the war, but it had also gone down in the 19 other countries, because the UN was unable to prevent the war. So we got hit from both sides of the debate. We disappointed both sets of expectations. Some famous and rather powerful voices began to speak of the UN’s irrelevance.
It was at the peak of this intense scrutiny of the UN, at a time when its potential and its deficiencies had never been more in the public eye, that Secretary-General Kofi Annan seized the moment.
In an historic speech to the General Assembly, he said that we had come to a fork in the road: we could either continue with business as usual, which could lead us to disaster, or we could review the entire architecture of the international system that had been built up since 1945, and build a more effective house of global governance for the twenty-first century.
The Secretary-General named a High-Level Panel of eminent persons to look into issues of peace and security, while a parallel group of economists studied in detail what the world needed to do to fulfil the commitments made on development by world leaders at the Millennium Summit in 2000. The High-Level Panel reported last December and the Millennium Project last January. In March, the Secretary-General synthesized their key recommendations for change in a report he titled In Larger Freedom.
The title comes from the preamble to the UN charter, which speaks of the UN striving "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom". By that magnificent phrase our founders clearly implied both that development is possible only in conditions of freedom, and that people can only benefit from political freedom when they have at least a fair chance of reaching decent living standards. Human rights, development and security are mutually interdependent and, taken together, they add up to larger freedom.
Of course, the UN often falls short of its noble aspirations, since it reflects the realities of world politics, even while seeking to transcend them. The UN, at its best and its worst, is a mirror of the world: it reflects our differences and our convergences, our hopes and aspirations as well as our limitations and failures.
But political freedom has been making headway, as first the peoples of Asia and Africa won freedom from colonialism, and then more and more peoples shook off dictatorship. When I joined the UN, it was almost unthinkable for the Organization to take sides between democracy and dictatorship, or seek to intervene in the internal affairs of its members. Even human rights were by no means universally agreed, with some states seeing them as a tool of Western neo-imperialism.
Today, by contrast, the UN itself does more than any other single organization to promote and strengthen democratic institutions and practices around the world. In the past year alone it has organized or assisted in elections in over 20 countries, often at decisive moments in their history – in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq and Burundi.
Which brings me back to the promises world leaders made in September. Let me give you just a few of the headlines.
Much has been made of their failure to deliver a formal legal definition of terrorism that is acceptable to all. But what few seem to have noticed is that – for the first time ever – we have a clear and unqualified condemnation – by all governments -- of terrorism “in all its forms and manifestations, committed by whomever, wherever and for whatever purposes.”
We have clearly come a long way from the endless debates over the justness of the cause, rather than the innocent lives lost. And there is now a strong political push for a comprehensive convention against terrorism within a year.
Another development – incremental but vitally important – is the acceptance, for the first time, of a collective international responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This should make it far more difficult for States to stand behind the protective shield of legal ambiguity while people are slaughtered en masse. The proof of the pudding, of course, is in the eating, but we now have a recipe that should work.
And the document also sets the timer for the creation of much stronger UN machinery to identify and address human rights violations. A detailed blueprint for a new Peacebuilding Commission was drafted. This body will ensure that international interventions to help countries emerging from conflict are coherent and sustained.
As we face these new challenges of our time, let us not forget the old ones – especially the persistent horror of underdevelopment. The combination of poverty, drought, famine and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa threatens more human lives than terrorism or the tsunami ever did.
The document the leaders produced reinforces the commitment by both rich and developing States to work together to promote development. It contains strong and unambiguous commitments by all governments to achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, and a promise of an additional $50 billion a year by 2010 for fighting poverty.
The document the leaders signed also includes agreement on mechanisms that should make successful and sustainable development more likely, including that international trade be liberalized by reducing the barriers and inequities that prevent poorer states from selling their goods and services in the markets of the North. Trade talks are underway as I write in Hong Kong to determine exactly how this commitment will work. Whatever their outcome, this issue is now firmly on the international agenda. There is no longer any excuse for leaving well over a billion of our fellow human beings in abject misery.
These are but a few of the promises that world leaders made at the UN in September.
Much flesh must be put on the bones of these commitments before we can say, with any certainty, that the world will be a better place because a large number of important men, and a few – too few -- women made the trip to New York in September.
But their representatives in the UN General Assembly are now fervently discussing what must be done to make the commitments of the Summit a reality.
At the World Summit, an agenda was set that promises great change. If our governments follow through on their promises, the rebirth and renewal of the UN will be just beginning, and with its renewal, we will also renew our hope for a fairer and safer world.
As Mahatma Gandhi put it, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The UN is no exception. To change the world, we must change too. |
