POLITICS-UN: Treaties Find an Audience in Cyberspace

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 15 1998 (IPS) - The public generally perceives of treaties as remote and musty documents for diplomats’ eyes only – but thanks to the United Nations, thousands of treaties are now accessible through the click of a computer.

The United Nations has placed more than 34,000 bilateral and multilateral treaties on the Internet, making them available for free to millions of people around the world. The treaties range from the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women – massive legal instruments which now reach a wider audience than ever.

“We have de-mystified international treaties,” said Palitha Kohona, chief of the U.N. Treaty Section. “As we go electronic, the sanctity of treaties has suddenly disappeared,” he added.

“Wider and easier access to this huge collection of treaties covering a broad spectrum of international intercourse can only assist in the development of a greater knowledge and understanding of treaties,” Kohona said.

Treaties, in fact, are one of the most popular features the United Nations has on the Worldwide Web, Kohona said. The U.N. Treaty Section (UNTS), he noted, receives an average of 25,000 ‘hits’ (or instances of usage) per week. “This is well beyond the reach of the 400 or so paper copies of each volume sold to the public annually,” he told IPS.

In recognition of the pioneering nature of the exercise and its complexity, the U.N. treaty series was nominated for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award in February 1998. In a letter to the United Nations in February, the Washington-based Smithsonian Institution said that Internet access to more than 34,000 treaties “reduces secret diplomacy and advances the cause of peace and the international rule of law.”

“The United Nations is using information technology to make great strides toward remarkable social achievement,” said David Allison, chairman of the National Museum of American History’s Division of Information Technology and Society.

The United Nations is currently depository of more than 40,000 international treaties and an equal number of related actions, including amendments and protocols collected since 1946. The treaties are now being made available on the Internet in the two main working U.N. languages, English and French.

The United Nations began its project to computerise all treaties into a huge database in 1997 at a cost of about 320,000 dollars. Since then, U.N. member states, international organisations and other depositories have been encouraged to submit their treaties and related information for registration and publication through the Internet.

The United Nations says the use of the electronic medium for the dissemination of the U.N. treaty collection is expected to save both human and financial resources.

In a report to the Committee on Information last week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan underscored the importance of electronic technology to the United Nations. “Among the many distinguishing qualities of the Internet is its capacity to act as a multimedia channel,” he said. “This quality, in particular, portends the placing of the Internet as one of the cornerstones of the communications strategies of the future.”

Annan said that as the United Nations goes high-tech, even the organisation’s Dag Hammarskjold Library is taking steps to become a library without walls, by designing a “virtual library” where members of the U.N. community will be able to access a wealth of information online.

Meanwhile, Ambassador Ahmad Kamal of Pakistan, chairman of the U.N. Working Group on Informatics, told the Committee that his Group has been able to link the U.N. missions of all 185 member states to the databases in the Secretariat.

Kamal said that despite the advances made so far, the problems confronting the U.N. informatics systems are “enormous.” The United Nations, for example, does not have an organisation-wide mechanism for technology planning and budgeting. Nor does it have a central mechanism to coordinate the world body’s ever-growing presence in cyberspace through its home page. “This is odd to say the least,” Kamal said.

“Cohesive, progressive and assertive information and communication policies are essential to strengthen the image of the United Nations in the world,” he said.