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POLITICS: U.N. Needs Radical Change, Says Panel

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 30 2004 (IPS) - The 191-member United Nations, which plans to celebrate its 60th anniversary next September, is urgently in need of radical change, rehabilitation and rejuvenation, according to a long-awaited report released Tuesday.

”The General Assembly (the highest policy-making body at the United Nations) has lost vitality and often fails to focus effectively on the most compelling issues of the day,” says the 95-page study titled, ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility’.

The Security Council, the only U.N. body with powers to declare war and peace, has failed to be pro-active and needs ”greater credibility, legitimacy and representation,” adds the report from the body known as the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.

The study adds that the Geneva-based U.N. Commission on Human Rights ”suffers from a legitimacy deficit that casts doubts on the overall reputation of the United Nations.”

There is also a ”need for a more professional and better organised (U.N.) Secretariat that is much more capable of concerted action.”

Additionally, new institutional arrangements must be made to address the economic and social threats to international security, concluded the body.

”The reforms we propose will not by themselves make the United Nations more effective,” the panel says, adding that the world body will ”still only be as strong as the energy, resources and attention devoted to them by member states and their leaders.”

The study, which is the first major attempt to spell out far-reaching reforms in an institution with nearly 60 years of successes and failures, was drafted by a 16-member, high-level group led by Anand Panyarachun, a former prime minister of Thailand.

The panel also included Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway; Brent Scowcroft, former U.S. national security adviser; Gareth Evans ex-foreign minister of Australia; Enrique Iglesias, former foreign minister of Uruguay; Amre Mousa, former foreign minister of Egypt; and Sadako Ogata, former U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

In dealing with one of the most controversial U.N. issues – the expansion of the 15-member Security Council – the panel offered two proposals, both calling for an increase in membership to 24.

The first suggestion calls for six new permanent members – two from Asia, two from Africa, one from the Americas and one from Europe – as well as three non-permanent members elected to two-year terms.

But the new permanent members will not have veto powers. Now, the Security Council has five permanent members with veto powers – the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia – and 10 non-permanent members elected to two-year terms.

The second proposal calls for a new tier of eight semi-permanent members – two each from Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas – with four-year renewable terms and one new two-year, non-permanent (and non-renewable) seat, none of them with a veto.

One expert says said the proposed reforms are not intended to make a more democratic Security Council.

”The panel has simply responded to pressures from powerful member states. At the end of the day this thing is not going to work”, said Jim Paul of the New York-based Global Policy Forum, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that closely monitors the United Nations.

Paul told IPS it is a well-known fact that if a body grows larger than 15 members (as the Security Council is now constituted), ”you lose the character of an executive body and you begin to move towards a legislative type of body”.

The 54-member U.N. Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the 191-member General Assembly are perfect examples of unwieldy U.N. bodies that ”cannot act in an executive fashion,” he added.

”If the Security Council is expanded, as proposed, it would also mean the creation of some sort of a sub committee or executive committee that will make the major decisions. And who would be part of that but the big powers?” Paul said. ”Far from democratising, the Security Council will be even less democratic,” he argued.

The members of the panel have also attempted to define ”terrorism” – an exercise at which the United Nations has failed for several decades.

It describes it as, ”any action … that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

The study comes at a time when the United States, which invaded Iraq in March 2003 despite the warnings of the world body, has declared the United Nations is on the verge of being ”irrelevant”.

The administration of U.S. President George W Bush has also justified the use of pre-emptive strikes on countries suspected of harbouring or fomenting terrorism.

”While much of the U.S. and European press has focused on the Security Council reform issues, the far more significant developments have to do with redefining the legitimacy of the use of pre-emptive or preventive force,” says Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of ‘Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today’s U.N’.

She said it is important that the panel did not favour rewriting or reinterpreting Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which justifies when a nation can use self-defence. But the report ultimately fails to answer the fundamental question of what to do when a state claims to face an imminent threat, but in fact the claim may be false, added Bennis.

”There is no indication of who has the right to make such a decision, and the dangerous implication is that any country, taking a lesson from the bald-faced falsehoods (used to justify) Washington’s and London’s claims of ‘imminent threat’ (from Iraq) … might simply announce to the world that X country represents an imminent danger and therefore we have the right to go to war without Security Council authorisation.”

And the panel says nothing about who might hold such countries accountable, added Bennis.

Importantly, the report distinguishes ”pre-emptive” military force, used against an allegedly imminent threat, from ”preventive” force, used in ”anticipatory self-defence,” meaning a longer-range claimed threat that is not imminent.

”The short answer,” as the panel describes it, ”is that if there are good arguments for preventive military action … they should be put to the Security Council, which can authorise such action if it chooses to.”

In other words, argues Bennis, the panel anticipates that even without rewriting or reinterpreting Article 51, the council may authorise force preventively – something never before anticipated as legitimate in international law.

According to her, an important contribution of the panel’s report is its recognition of the breadth of threats facing the 21st century world: not simply terrorism, as the Bush administration continues to emphasise.

The study identifies six clusters of current and future threats: economic and social threats, including poverty, infectious diseases and environment degradation; inter-state conflict; internal conflict, including civil war, genocide and large-scale atrocities; nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons; terrorism; and transnational organised crime.

But its other key unanswered question, said Bennis, is whether there is an implicit recognition of the kind of double standard that characterises so much of U.N. policy – with veto-wielding members of the Security Council held to a lesser standard than other countries.