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Doubts and scepticism about the UN have been commonplace throughout its history, but there are times when this questioning goes deeper. Is the UN still relevant or is it becoming redundant? Is it at risk of being overtaken by other regional and international initiatives?
The role of the UN has been under scrutiny since the end of the cold war – but more particularly since the Security Council’s refusal to condone intervention in Iraq. Partly in response, the 2005 World Summit put the organisation through a CAT scan and agreed on a long list of recommendations for reforming and renewing the place.
To add to the current mood of introversion, the UN is of course going through a transition in its leadership. From a well known Secretary-General who had a lifetime long UN career behind him, to a relatively unknown figure. Ban Ki moon is still orienting himself to the ways of the UN and is not yet battle hardened on the international circuit.
At the same time, member states’ expectations of the UN are evolving. There is widespread criticism that the UN is too slow to respond to the problems now seen as most urgent. Attention is shifting to the interlinked global problems that straddle human security, migration, environmental degradation and climate change.
Today’s demands are new and multi faceted but the machinery is old and creaking. It is organised in silos rather than in flexible teams. There is a need for reform and renewal as an ongoing process, if the UN is to remain fully relevant. But there is no consensus about where reform effort should be concentrated to make the Organisation more effective.
Ideological divides and regional group rigidities continue to frustrate good intentions. On the positive side, there is a resilience and a persistent optimism about the UN which springs from the Charter itself.
The “we the peoples of the United Nations” commitments - “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; … to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish the conditions for justice and respect for international law; to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom” - still ring true. These evergreen words on the fundamental purposes of the UN have an enduring power to inspire.
The questions I shall explore tonight are how well is today’s UN delivering on these promises and what does it need to do to stay relevant? What are New Zealand’s priority interests? What does the scorecard on UN reform and renewal look like? What are the group dynamics in New York and where does New Zealand fit in? How is the new Secretary-General measuring up, and finally, time for your questions.
In his valedictory speech last December, SG Kofi Annan distilled from his 44 years of experience at the UN five principles which he saw as essential for the future conduct of international relations; collective responsibility; global solidarity; the rule of law; mutual accountability and a commitment to multilateralism.
The UN provides the framework to exercise collective responsibility and to demonstrate global solidarity (remember the strong statements immediately after 9/11). It sets a foundation of human rights obligations and other norms for member states to take up. When there are crimes against humanity which outrage the global community, the UN can act through the International Criminal Court and set up tribunals - as for the Rwanda genocide and the Khmer Rouge regime.
We can agree with Kofi Annan that much has been achieved through the UN since it was established in 1945, but more remains to be done to put those five principles into practice.
In a Chatham House speech a month ago SG Ban Ki-moon acknowledged that perceptions of the UN tend to be drawn in various shades of grey. He was nonetheless optimistic about its future. He said “our world of complex challenges is exactly the environment in which our United Nations should thrive – because these are challenges that no country can resolve on its own. It is a world in which the UN can, and must grow and take on new roles, develop and deliver on new fronts”.
So much for Secretaries-General. What about ordinary people around the world? What are their expectations and hopes for the UN? The Chicago Council on Global Affairs through public opinion polling in May this year found that around the world, people favoured radical steps to strengthen the UN, even giving it the power to have its own standing peacekeeping force. They wanted it to regulate the international arms trade and for the Security Council to authorise military force to prevent severe human rights abuses such as genocide.
These views came from 14 countries representing 56% of the world’s population. The survey showed that in international public opinion, strengthening the United Nations was seen as an important foreign policy goal. The Chicago Council concluded that despite well publicised disagreements over the role of the United Nations in world affairs, the much criticised organisation was still seen as the vehicle for conflict resolution and international cooperation on a wide range of pressing problems.
Herein lies the conundrum. There is an expectation that the UN should respond to every new need, without any significant increase in resources and without eliminating or downgrading any of its activities. Energetic but so far unsuccessful attempts have been made over the last 18 months to review the 8000 mandates which are “live” on the UN’s books. Many of these are historical.
No organisation can function with such an agenda, with sedimentary layers of historical issues and requests for reports that few people will read. The oxygen needed for new areas is sucked up by this featureless landscape of demands. The other constraint has been a reluctance by member states to increase the regular budget, resulting in a growing reliance on voluntary contributions.
The duplication and fragmentation of mandates raises the fundamental question: what should the UN be doing? What is it doing well and where is it deficient or overstretched? Where should it go in the future?
There are as I see it three main categories of UN activities
Let’s look at the new areas. At the top of the Secretary-General’s list is catalysing a more decisive response to climate change. But there are other equally urgent areas where the UN has an unfulfilled role to play.
First among these at the operational level is conflict prevention and mediation. The new Under- Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Lynn Pascoe, has been quick to recognise that the UN is putting disproportionate resources into fixing problems, through peacekeeping, and not nearly enough into proactively trying to prevent problems from erupting into conflict.
The first practical step he is taking is to beef up the Mediation Support Unit in the Department of Political Affairs, to give the UN a much needed ability to draw on a small team of experienced mediators based in New York, or a roster of people with regional expertise who could be quickly available.
At the conceptual level, there is the no longer new but yet to be fully developed concept of responsibility to protect. This seeks to confer on the international community the right to bring pressure to bear on a country where the government of that country has failed to take the necessary steps to prevent its own population from harm.
Debate around this controversial concept centres on the troubling question of just what this pressure should be, and how far it can challenge traditional respect for sovereignty.
Another debate is on security sector reform; the attempt to extract from UN and donor country experience to date the general principles and guidelines that might help countries emerging from conflict to take the right decisions in the right order, to restore key security and justice actors and institutions.
If as member states we want the UN to be quick and competent in responding to these and the many other new needs, then we have to be prepared to streamline its way of working, update its human resource and management practices and to modernise all the underpinnings of an effective organisation.
This brings me to the scorecard on reform and renewal. How well have we member states done over the past two years to carry out the reforms mandated by the 2005 World Summit? If the perfect score was 10, for completing all the changes leaders asked us to make, my estimate is that our actual score is at best 4.
First the achievements: establishment of the new Human Rights Council and the Peacebuilding Commission. I hesitate to call them successes as they have yet to settle into a pattern of work and to prove themselves.
The first big ticket outcome from the Summit was the establishment of the Human Rights Council, to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. The guiding philosophy at the time of creation was that the new Council should focus on capability building, but should retain the right to single out for country resolution attention persistent and wilful human rights abusers.
Since the Council is only a year and two months old, its most strident critics should in my view exercise patience before condemning it as worse than its predecessor.
The other new body is the Peacebuilding Commission, which was intended to bridge a potentially destabilising gap between what happens in a post-conflict country after the UN peacekeeping mission leaves, and before it is safe and normal enough for donors to return.
The Peacebuilding Commission is an experiment. Operating only in two countries to date – Sierra Leone and Burundi – it is still finding its feet, but early indications are that it may be able to add value.
Donors have been prepared to give the PBC a vote of confidence with total pledges of US $226m and $143m of this actually in the bank. Unfortunately there has been too much focus on funding and not enough on what was supposed to be the primary purpose of the Commission – helping the conflict torn to set up stronger foundations of government so that aid can be effective.
Security Council expansion is proving to be the most elusive of the reform targets. So far there is no consensus among member states about what would be better than the status quo.
In fact the only consensus is that the status quo needs updating – and even that view is not strongly held by the many countries who would be quite relieved if nothing changed. Underneath this inertia lies a scepticism as to whether expansion of the Council would in fact dilute the powers of the permanent five – or whether it might simply make the Council less effective than it is now, by slowing its processes and decision making.
Moments of perceived failure by the Council over the past decade, indeed over its life span, have to do with failure of political will to act or to provide the necessary resources, not with a shortage of countries around the table to take a decision.
In the last year we have continued to witness the power of the permanent five. There is a history of US vetoes on Middle East issues. In December last year, a double veto by China and Russia blocked a resolution on the security and human rights record of the regime in Myanmar. Just last month, Russia used the threat of its veto power to paralyse a resolution that would have led toward an independent state of Kosovo.
I have heard Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under-Secretary-General for political affairs and one of the first members of the UN secretariat comment that the key to improved Security Council performance has little to do with size or structure. It would happen when Council members are willing to put aside national interests for the greater global good. Unfortunately, as he conceded, this is likely to happen only in periods of extreme global instability or crisis.
New Zealand sees the current structure of the Council as anachronistic. But we want to ensure that any changes contribute to a genuine improvement in both the effectiveness and “representativeness” of the Council. This means we strongly oppose any extension of the veto, which is the formal position of the African group. New Zealand’s position is that any satisfactory expansion of the Council would need to include Japan.
This long and contentious debate on Security Council reform looks set to continue into the 62nd session. One possible path which has emerged more clearly in discussions this year would be to try an interim expansion. It is not yet clear whether there is sufficient support for this approach to more fully develop how it might work
Reform has been a priority for New Zealand at the UN over the past three years, but we have had many other goals.
We have had many other goals. The election of Sir Kenneth Keith to the International Court of Justice was a proud moment. We have been active on oceans governance. I chaired this year’s meeting of the States Parties to the Law of the Sea Convention. We helped to bring to final adoption in March the new disabilities convention, which had been negotiated in record time under Don Mackay’s skilful chairmanship. Two weeks ago today, the Minister for Women’s Affairs presented New Zealand’s sixth national report to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women.
Looking ahead, we shall be working closely with the UN’s Special Committee on Decolonisation in preparation for the Tokelau’s referendum on future status, to be held in October.
We will also continue to engage with the Department of Peacekeeping Operations over New Zealand’s military and police personnel deployed with UN peacekeeping missions; and with key members of the Security Council as the mandates for those missions come up for renewal. For instance, the current mandate for the UN Mission in Timor-Leste will be reviewed, and possibly amended, in September this year.
I will comment briefly on the atmospherics in New York, the group dynamics and where New Zealand fits in.
Many of my colleagues – even those who have served in New York before – have been surprised by the degree of dysfunctionality and mistrust that has arisen over recent years among the various groups. The G77 (actually 130) of developing countries and the Non Aligned Movement (now 118, including PNG and Vanuatu) and the increasingly influential organisation of Islamic states.
Put most simply, developed and developing countries make a different diagnosis as to what are the most pressing problems for the UN to address. This makes it so hard to achieve genuine revitalisation, or indeed to achieve anything. Developing countries complain that since 9/11, the developed world has put undue emphasis on security at the expense of development.
Other dividing lines are along human rights and values; and the point at which multilateralism collides with the overarching importance (as many G77 and NAM countries see it) of sovereignty. This has been clearly illustrated in the ongoing struggle for the Security Council to produce a humanitarian solution alongside a political stabilisation in Darfur.
The overall effect of uneasy inter-group relations is to make progress harder to achieve because everyone is suspicious of each other’s motives. Within this prickly atmosphere, New Zealand enjoys a positive reputation and profile. We enhance this through our CANZ coordination.
We also draw benefits – along with Australia – from our membership of the Pacific Islands Forum group in New York. In this context New Zealand often joins PIF on issues of closest interest in our region – generally oceans and fisheries, but also sustainable development and climate change. This gives us a developing country friendly face, as others see us.
You will be wondering how the new Secretary-General is measuring up. It was Trygve Lie who first described the position of Secretary-General as the most impossible job in the world. While the still rather opaque selection process was under way last year, the common observation around New York was, why would anyone want to take this on?
Ban Ki-moon did so with sincere promises to make his very best efforts to heal the divisions within the membership, and to address with new determination the most intransigent political and security problems which come to the UN like “foundlings dropped off at night”, as Kofi Annan put it.
You may have seen that there has lately been a rash of critical media comment. There have been stumbles – the SG would be the first to admit that. There is no flight manual for this job – you just have to take it on and try to make it work. Most Secretaries-General take about a year to find out not only how to use the levers of power, but where to find them in the first place.
Ban Ki-moon became Secretary-General without Kofi Annan’s deep UN background. His settling in period inevitably involves a steeper learning curve. In today’s world, it is not possible to hide that the gradient is requiring a hard climb. But we have to give the new SG a realistic time frame to show that he can get there.
He has selected for his personal focus a combination of tough problems and areas where the UN needs to do better; Darfur and Sudan; the Middle East; climate change; achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. His first big outreach will be to world leaders attending his Climate Change High Level Event on 24 September.
Finally I return to my opening question. Is the UN still relevant or is it at risk of becoming redundant, or displaced by other initiatives?
The international stage is more crowded with actors and would be players than could have been envisaged back in 1945. The EU, the G8, APEC, MERCOSUR, ASEAN, and the African Union.
Then there is the phenomenon of celebrity diplomacy. The Bob Geldof and Bono promotions of the Millennium Development Goals and programmes for Africa. Angelina Jolie and George Clooney’s profile on Darfur and humanitarian work. Leonardo di Caprio working with Al Gore on Live Earth concerts to capture attention on climate change.
All these can and do draw attention to global issues. But only the UN itself through the Security Council has a mandate to address serious conflict and security threats by activating its peacekeeping role. Only the UN can confer the legitimacy needed for hybrid or regional groups to respond to conflict. Only the UN can act as a global convenor of its 192 member states. Only the UN can serve as an open to all, international debating chamber and seed bed for new ideas.
I conclude that the UN is still relevant, but it will become less so unless it modernises itself and its systems. New Zealand has long recognised this risk. Working with likeminded member states, we are doing our best to ensure that our Organisation is fit for the 21st century.
Each succeeding generation has to revive the spirit of the Charter and re-energise the Organisation to fulfil the noble objectives of 1945. This is the challenge for us all.
