The General Assembly held a “dialogue” on May 7, 2021, with the UN’s member countries and António Guterres, the only officially recognized candidate for UN secretary-general and an incumbent. Only two civil society groups were able to ask questions across the three-hour session. Credit: ESKINDER DEBEBE/UN PHOTO

By Barbara Crossette
NEW YORK, May 12 2021 (IPS)

It was all over in one crucial week. Barring an unforeseen hitch, António Guterres is the clear winner of a second, five-year term as secretary-general of the United Nations, beginning on Jan.1, 2022. This was not a surprise: he had no major competition and the process moved faster than expected.

A three-hour question-and-answer session with UN diplomats from around the world in the General Assembly on May 7 appeared to support a growing sense internationally that the Security Council may decide by late June or July, three months before the normal deadline for a candidacy to go to the General Assembly for final affirmation.

Guterres spoke mostly in generalities at the session, but he sometimes used statistics and technical points about his vision for the UN in the ensuing years.

The center of his campaign in 2016, on preventing conflicts, has not been borne out under his current leadership, some diplomats contend.

The Armenian ambassador, Mher Margaryan, asked Guterres, for example, how he would “strengthen” the UN’s response to early-warning signs of atrocity crimes occurring. (United States President Joe Biden recently recognized the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.) Guterres answered, in brief, that the problem was not missing early-warning signs but “the problem is in early action.”

In July, the rotating presidency of the Council will be held by France, which may announce the decision to back the 72-year-old Guterres, a diplomat from Latin America, told PassBlue. The European Union has been the strongest supporter of the incumbent secretary-general, as Guterres is from Portugal, so a fellow European. He was the only candidate proposed by a government, Portugal.

The Biden administration has not formally and publicly endorsed Guterres. In remarks to a Security Council debate on multilateralism, also on May 7, however, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke of a renewed American commitment to the UN Charter and international cooperation after the destructive Trump years.

“Nationalism is resurgent, repression is rising. Rivalries among countries are deepening — and attacks against the rules-based order are intensifying,” he said to his fellow Council members and the public. “Now, some question whether multilateral cooperation is still possible.”

“Multilateralism is still our best tool for tackling big global challenges, like the one that’s forcing us to gather on a screen today rather than today rather than around a table,” Blinken added, describing the Council’s virtually staged session because of the pandemic.

On May 4, the General Assembly president, Volkan Bozkir, explained in a news conference why he had ruled out candidates other than Guterres for the May 7 event. Seven people have submitted applications to him in the last few months, and civil society organizations were also calling for a wider slate. Bozkir, a Turk, passed all applications to the Council, he said at the news conference.

“It looks like the Security Council has a view that only candidates or applicants supported by a country will be considered by the Security Council,” he said to numerous questions on the process. None of the applicants has been recognized by Bozkir or any of the monthly rotating Council presidents, who both lead the procedure.

Further confusing reporters, Bozkir added, “And again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a person who is supported by a country will get the guarantee of becoming a candidate.”

Armenia’s ambassador to the UN asked how the organization could better react to early-warning signs of atrocities, May 7, 2021.

None of the Council’s permanent members with veto power — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — has so far publicly questioned a second term for Guterres. And Guterres has certainly not ruffled those countries’ feathers too much, to the consternation of certain civil society advocates, like Human Rights Watch.

In 2001, the US vetoed a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt and persuaded other Council members to back Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, who then served two terms unopposed.

How and why did Guterres win the approval of the Security Council members so easily? With Western support locked in, he spoke last week by phone with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, without revealing whether the subject of the secretary-generalship came up. China has welcomed his bid for a second term.

Guterres is planning a trip to Moscow from May 12 to 13. The speech by Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, at the Security Council session on May 7 was the most bitter during the discussion of multilateralism. His remarks were directed at Western democracies.

Guterres, who was UN high commissioner for refugees for a decade, has been what could be described as an acceptable head of the UN for many of its 193 member governments.

He is, however, not a popular or well-known figure outside the UN, nor is he much liked among many employees of the organization, according to civil society groups, advocates and some UN staff themselves.

He is criticized for being a secretive minimalist who has not dealt well with internal crises, such as the continuing, documented sexual abuse in and around UN peacekeeping and the scant help available for survivors of rape and other assaults.

Women are often the most vulnerable people not only where UN peacekeeping operations are based or in active conflict zones but also in refugee camps or ad hoc congregations of displaced people. Men and children also suffer.

When babies are born of rape, they often grow up in extreme poverty, hungry and stigmatized for life, and the UN defers the resolution of these hardships to the national governments of the peacekeepers instead of getting involved directly.

Guterres said on May 7 in the General Assembly in response to critiques and questions from civil society participants (only two were given the opportunity to be heard) that the UN was, for example, meeting resistance from governments over problems like conducting paternity tests of peacekeepers when complaints were lodged.

In his introductory remarks to diplomats taking part in the live session, in which he appeared flustered at times, he acknowledged that much of civil society had not been offered seats “at the world’s main diplomatic table.” He added that cities, the corporate world and young people are “essential voices that must he heard.”

He also said, agreeing with some envoys who raised the issue at the dialogue, that the UN system needed better coordination of all its parts — agencies, programs and semiautonomous bodies like the World Health Organization. Yet that bureaucratic challenge has never been solved by any secretary-general, despite attempts at reform.

The most insistent opposition to the renewal of Guterres’s appointment came from advocates for the election of a woman and diverse groups that generally backed a more transparent process for selecting the chief official of the UN, such as the 1 for 7 Billion campaign.

The UN, at 76 years old, has never been led by a woman. The demands of advocates included adding women to the list of candidates and not requiring applicants to have official endorsement of governments. But both requests have been overlooked by Bozkir and the monthly Security Council presidents.

The important involvement of advocates for a woman as secretary-general is a sign of changing times. More women are emerging in top political positions in many countries, corporations and other high-profile organizations.

Some, like Angela Merkel, the retiring German chancellor, made it clear that she did not want the job of UN secretary-general, despite persistent questions about her interests. Other women elected as prime ministers or presidents of their countries think they would be more useful in geopolitics as national leaders.

And some of the women who could have challenged Guterres this year saw the light early on: as a white, male incumbent who knew how to navigate around the self-interests of the permanent Council members, he was a shoo-in.

In 2016, under a more open campaign process, there was no incumbent. Ban Ki-moon, a South Korean who had completed two terms, was also a widely criticized secretary-general for an administration that was often cloaked in secrecy and shielded by fellow South Korean aides.

Well-qualified women competed to be elected his successor in 2016, a position that ultimately went to Guterres, a former prime minister.

Among the women competing in 2016 were Irina Bokova, a Bulgarian and former director-general of Unesco; Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand and administrator of the UN Development Program; Kristalina Georgieva, also Bulgarian, a former European Commissioner for International Cooperation and now managing director of the International Monetary Fund; and Susana Malcorra, who had been Ban’s chief of staff before becoming Argentina’s foreign minister when she ran.

This year, there were no equally qualified women interested in seeking the job against considerable odds; the few campaigns that surfaced — including “protest candidates” against UN “corruption” — quickly became sideshows.

Even one potentially serious candidate who emerged recently, Rosalía Arteaga, a short-lived president of Ecuador, said she had the support of President Lenín Moreno but then asked him to drop it, as she preferred to be a “civil society” candidate, she told PassBlue in an email. (A new Ecuadorean president, Guillermo Lasso, is to be inaugurated this month.)

Many feminist organizations, realizing the futility of launching campaigns for candidates this year, opted to wait it out until the 2027 term. With the world in crisis on many fronts and a seasoned politician in charge at the UN, it was believed that being a woman was not enough this year. Moreover, no woman wanted to compete, keenly aware of the negative optics of losing.

A list of six Latin American women — some former heads of state, like Michelle Bachelet of Chile (now the UN high commissioner for human rights) — circulated this spring among high-level political circles in the region to test who might be the most successful candidate to run for secretary-general next time.

But Eastern Europe, which tried to win the current term because it was that region’s unofficial turn to claim the job, is ready to contest Latin America on that front.

Last month, Maritza Chan, a diplomat from Costa Rica, pointed out in a meeting at the UN about the overall secretary-general selection process that her country “strongly believes that the time has come to select a female secretary-general. . . . We believe that should qualifications among candidates be equal, we should choose a woman.”

By doing this, she added, “we uphold the principle of equality and empower the women of today and tomorrow.”

Lyric Thompson is the senior director of policy and advocacy at the International Center for Research on Women, which grades the work of Guterres with annual report card on gender issues. He got a B for 2020, up from a C- in 2017 and a B- in both 2018 and 2019.

Thompson, who was a member of the Biden administration’s delegation to the UN’s annual Commission on the Status of Women this year, pointed to tough speeches by Guterres warning of pushbacks on women’s rights and his frequent condemnations of worsening violence against women and girls. He also attempted, with limited success, to persuade governments to donate more financially to UN initiatives on women.

Indeed, Guterres calls entrenched patriarchy “stupid,” and told an audience in New York City early in 2020: “Just as slavery and colonialism were a stain on previous centuries, women’s inequality should shame us all in the twenty-first.”

In an interview with PassBlue early this year, Thompson said that feminists were focusing on the next election for a secretary-general.

“I think we will see an unprecedented drive for a female SG after his second term,” she said, adding that “this is a long way off . . . which means the UN will not have had a woman leader across its 81-year-history.”

The post The UN’s Guterres, an Incumbent With Strong Backing by Europe, Is Bound to Win Another Term appeared first on PassBlue.

Barbara Crossette is United Nations correspondent for The Nation, a senior fellow of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the City University of New York, contributing editor at PassBlue.com, and a freelance writer on foreign policy and international affairs. Most recently she was a co-author with George Perkovich of a section on India in the 2009 book Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World.

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Excerpt:

By Barbara Crossette
NEW YORK, Oct 3 2019 (IPS)

For the first time since a new development agenda was adopted in 2015 to make the world a better place for everyone, government leaders assembled at the United Nations in late September to take stock of progress. The verdict of this summit was not good.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the centerpiece of Agenda 2030, were on life support in the eyes of many experts in and around the high-level UN sessions. Some goals were in danger of reversing earlier gains.

A new strategy, however, devised by a team of international development experts, was presented for governments to consider to turn around the bad news about the faltering goals.

“Our goal to end extreme poverty by 2030 is being jeopardized as we struggle to respond to entrenched deprivation, violent conflicts and vulnerabilities to natural disasters,” Secretary-General António Guterres wrote when the latest data on the SDGs were released in July 2019.

The numbers provided background to the meeting of world leaders in New York during the opening of the 74th General Assembly.

“Global hunger is on the rise, and at least half of the world’s population lacks essential health services,” Guterres wrote. “More than half of the world’s children do not meet standards in reading and mathematics; only 28 per cent of persons with severe disabilities received cash benefits; and women in all parts of the world continue to face structural disadvantages and discrimination.

“It is abundantly clear that a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals.”

Guterres reiterated his message of urgency when he opened the high-level review of the SDGs on Sept. 24. Speaking the next day, Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed was more optimistic about what she saw as “the boundless potential of humanity to create a better future for all.” Mohammed, however, who had shepherded the goals into their final form in 2015, acknowledged that progress was off track.

The data report in July revealed that despite some gains, many millions of people among the world’s 7.7 billion people were living in shocking conditions. That included the 785 million people without basic drinking water services and three billion people still lacking clean cooking fuels, contributing to poor health.

Fewer than half of the people in the world had access to safe sanitation, and 673 million were forced to defecate in the open, according to the latest statistics from 2017.

“Achieving universal access to even basic sanitation services by 2030 will require a doubling of the current annual rate of progress,” the secretary-general has noted.

Separately, a UN special rapporteur on human rights, Urmila Bhoola, reported that more than 40 million people are enslaved worldwide, a quarter of them children, and that the numbers are expected to rise.

More than 60 percent of those in forced labor work in the private sector, with women and girls disproportionately affected. Almost all of them — 98 percent — have experienced sexual violence, said Bhoola, who reports on contemporary forms of slavery.

Against this dismal panorama, a new report emerged with talking points for the gathering of government officials on the SDGs during the UN General Assembly session this month. The report challenged current assumptions and thinking on the planning and implementing of development projects.

Titled “The Future Is Now: Science for Achieving Sustainable Development,” the report does not attempt to rewrite the 17 development goals or their mind-numbing 169 targets.

Instead, the authors, a team of 15 experts in social and natural sciences assembled in 2016 from developing and industrial countries, concluded that goals could be interconnected or clustered to promote synergistic exchanges for greater effectiveness and should not be isolated in 17 silos.

Leading the group as co-chairs were Peter Messerli, director of the Center for Development and Environment at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and Endah Murniningtyas, a former deputy planning minister of Indonesia. The UN’s Department of Social and Economic Affairs published their report. (For a global projection of how far off the targets are, see https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/gsdr2019 Table 1-1.)

The scientists recommended six areas that could be collaboratively transformative: issues of human well-being and abilities; sustainable and just economies; sustainable food systems and healthy nutrition; energy decarbonization; urban and peri-urban development; and the global environmental commons. They named four “levers” that could be used to spur action: governance, economy and finance, individual and collective action and science and technology.

The underlying importance of science, including the professional collection of credible data, is a theme that runs throughout the report. Governance is also given prominence in both identifying and implementing the goals.

In “The Future Is Now” report, the scientists appeared to conclude that new thinking was needed.

“Every country and region should design and rapidly implement integrated pathways to sustainable development that correspond to their specific needs and priorities, and contribute also to the necessary global transformation,” the authors said.

Using one issue, childhood nutrition, the authors described how their report’s “entry points” can be linked: “For instance, changes in food habits towards more healthy diets may result from individual and collective action, which is informed by scientific knowledge that can directly influence choices made by families, while supporting governance initiatives such as mandatory food labelling and schools limiting students access to sugary drinks.”

The emphasis on collaboration and interaction within and among countries suggests that the current lack of such links reflects not only failures of governance but also the impetus and structure of the SDGs.

David Malone is the rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo and a former president of Canada’s International Development Research Center. He was asked by PassBlue why the SDGs have faltered while the Millennium Development Goals that preceded them were more successful.

“The Millennium Development Goals arose from a desire of the developing continents to refocus the UN on development issues after the decade of the 1990s had focused the UN very much on peace and security,” according to Malone, who has been Canada’s ambassador to India, Nepal and Bhutan as well as deputy chief of Canada’s UN mission.

“They offered the considerable benefit of being simple and clear, few in number (8) with few accompanying targets and indicators,” he said in an email response. “They were not developed by member states, but rather in the office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan several months after the Millennium Summit”.

“That they were mostly attained owes a great deal to the manageable nature of the package, so to speak. But it probably owes more to a very significant growth spurt in both Asia and Africa and to a strong focus on social development in Latin America between the years 2000 and 2015.”

“The members states of the UN very much wished to develop the successor platform, the SDGs, themselves,” he added. “The result was a fairly political approach including compromises that were essentially additive — each country’s or region’s pet priority being somehow accommodated — with little attention to the ability of many governments to implement complex schemes developed internationally”.

The SDGs involve 17 goals, 169 targets and over 200 indicators by which those targets can be measured.

“After their adoption, it became clear within two years that many governments, particularly those with limited administrative capacity, while celebrating the goals, were not actually using them in planning or budgeting national priorities. The UN Secretariat has signaled several times now that on current global economic growth trends, many of the SDGs are unlikely to be attained. Politics nationally, regionally and globally are hardly cooperating either. And SDG success is very much hostage to both sets of factors.”

A significant difference between the SDGs and the MDGs is that the former should apply to every nation, not only developing countries, and that all governments are expected to declare their aspirations, plan their appropriate policies and track their national progress.

That has not happened in numerous places. One of the most glaring examples is the United States. A State Department website on the topic qualifies it by an advisory that it “is a work in progress” and mostly devoid of US-specific information or commitment.

Among other advanced economies, the Europeans have done much better, with a number of related websites, beginning with an overview of regional policies.

On Sept 24 at the UN, a panel of European Union and developing-country partners in the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States announced a new commitment to the 2030 Agenda, backed by about $32 million, from the Europeans.

Canada, with numerous websites introduced by a comprehensive policy statement, is also active, as is Japan. It has multiple online sites, including one following the work of its national task forces carrying out the sustainable goals.

Excerpt:

Amina Mohammed, right, the deputy secretary-general of the UN, signed a partnership agreement with the World Economic Forum, led by Borge Brende, left, to speed up progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. António Guterres, the UN secretary-general (behind Mohammed) and Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s chief executive, joined the ceremony in June.

By Barbara Crossette
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 25 2019 (IPS)

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in trouble. United Nations officials are concerned and say so publicly. Secretary-General António Guterres joined in raising an alarm in mid-July when he introduced the most recent official UN report.

“It is abundantly clear that a much deeper, faster and more ambitious response is needed to unleash the social and economic transformation needed to achieve our 2030 goals,” he wrote. Separately, a mammoth, 478-page study by independent experts drove the message home with extensive data to illustrate the crisis.

The experts’ report, a joint project of the Bertelsmann Stiftung in Germany and Sustainable Development Solutions Network in New York, reveals some bleak findings: progress has been uneven at best, and in some cases has been reversed.

The study found that all nations were performing worst on addressing climate change, and no country has achieved a “green” rating. Many obstacles to success or the causes of reversals included tax havens, banking secrecy, poor labor standards, slavery and conflict.

Half the nations of the world are not on track to eradicate extreme poverty, a major — if not the primary — objective of the goals, the report found. Action on the SDGs, which were adopted in 2015 as the 2030 Agenda, are nearing their fifth year of implementation.

The most striking prediction of potential failure has, perhaps surprisingly, come from the top UN official in Asia. On July 18, the head of the Bangkok-based regional commission for Asia and the Pacific (Escap), Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana of Indonesia, warned in a UN News radio interview while attending a high-level UN forum on development in New York that her region was on track to miss all the goals.

The area covers a vast swath of the globe, stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the Pacific rim, home to 60 percent of the world’s 7.7 people. China, India and Indonesia alone account for nearly three billion people. Alisjahbana, a UN under secretary-general, said that Escap’s latest survey showed some evidence that the region is going backward, particularly in water resources and environmental sustainability.

At UN headquarters, one controversial and much-debated response to the crisis has been to team up in a “strategic partnership” with the World Economic Forum. This institution, founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, a German economist and engineer, is best known for its annual star-studded, invitation-only get-togethers in Davos, a Swiss mountain resort, which attracts government officials, business leaders and celebrities.

In announcing the partnership with the UN in a broad statement of intent with few details, the World Economic Forum claimed that it can “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

It defines itself as “the international organization for public-private cooperation” and lists six areas where the UN partnership can boost the development goals: in financing the 2030 Agenda and in addressing climate change, health, digital cooperation, gender equality and education.

The Forum has been steadily expanding its international presence through convening “thought leaders” around the world on topical issues, to exchange ideas and build influential networks on economic, industrial and social initiatives.

Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed signed the joint framework agreement for the UN with Borge Brende, the Forum’s president. Guterres and Klaus Schwab, the Forum’s executive chairman, were onlookers at the ceremony on June 13.

Mohammed, who led the formulation of the SDGs, has dominated the UN’s development agenda, sidelining the UN Development Program.

She was a strong proponent of creating the SDG package on the advice and consent of governments — bottom-up from the field, not top-down as the Millennium Development Goals were written in 2000 by international development specialists in and around the office of Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Through the new UN-World Economic Forum, Mohammed is increasing her international roles. She will be taking part in numerous Forum initiatives and will review the possibility of linking the UN’s resident development coordinators in national capitals with Forum programs.

The theory underlying the creation of the SDGs, with governments as the key decision-makers, was a gamble. Human rights received no significant attention in the SDGs, reflecting numerous governments’ attitudes or demands on these issues.

Rapid social changes and their place in development were ignored: the burgeoning international movement for LGBTQ recognition and rights, new diversity in what may constitute a “family” and the rising tide of activist women challenging male domination in politics and society, to name a few.

The SDGs are unwieldy, as critics have pointed out since the adoption of the 2030 agenda. The 17 goals are burdened with 169 targets and 230 indicators for measuring progress.

The strategic partnership with the World Economic Forum is not the first UN approach to the private sector.

Stephen Browne, the author of a book that will be published later this year, “UN Reform: 75 Years of Challenge and Change,” worked for more than 30 years in the UN development system, including in Africa and Asia.

He has observed the trajectory of UN/private-sector cooperation, which has had some positive effects, he writes in the new book. With the creation of the Global Compact (which Annan introduced at the World Economic Forum in 1999), “relations with the private sector took on another dimension.”

Browne writes: “The timing was germane. Globalization was already raising anxieties about its inclusiveness and it was appropriate for the UN to be shown conveying some concern to the private sector. . . . Galvanizing private sector interest in UN goals has had the positive effect of enhancing interest in and comprehension of the world body, helping to improve its public image in commercial circles.

The UN has also become better known to the private sector through the many GC local networks which have been established in all the major emerging economies.

“But the GC [Global Compact] has also carried risks for the UN, leaving it open to accusations of associating with companies indulging in corporate malpractice. . . . The Global Compact cannot wholly avoid ‘blue wash’ [the UN equivalent to whitewash in the eyes of critics] but it restricts the use of the UN logo and establishes conditions for the selection of commercial partners. . . . Companies are in a large majority on the GC Board and are the principal contributors to the trust fund which supports the GC secretariat. Critics have claimed that the GC serves as a platform for the promotion of corporate interests at the UN, and not the other way round as originally intended.”

Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-moon, who asked all UN agencies and projects to stress overarching human-rights criteria in their work and publications, created several more narrowly targeted partnerships in, for example, stressing women’s importance in development, advancing sustainable energy and improving nutrition.

“There is a sense, however,” Browne writes in his forthcoming book, “that the UN perceived these initiatives as ends in themselves: any partnership being better than none. There has never been a rigorous attempt to evaluate the UN’s [multistakeholder partnerships] and determine whether they actually add significant value. . . . It is not even clear to what extent they have succeeded in mobilizing additional funding.”

Partnerships with corporations and rich foundations have drawn sustained criticism from various civil society sectors, especially when companies are producing and promoting goods — foods, for example — that are considered to have harmful effects on children or the general population.

In a message from Geneva, where he lives, Browne described his persistent qualm about reliance on private-sector agreements and compacts: “My real contention,” he wrote, “is that the UN goes into partnerships as if they are a desirable end in themselves, without having determined what real net human development benefits have flowed from them, or could flow.”

The post As the SDGs Falter, the UN Turns to the Rich and Famous appeared first on PassBlue.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, right, and Kingston Rhodes, chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, a regulatory body of the UN, April 13, 2017. Rhodes, from Sierra Leone, retired a few weeks early from his job in December, amid allegations he had engendered a hostile workplace for women.

By Barbara Crossette
Jan 7 2019 (PassBlue)

Amid a busy December, when the United Nations was focusing on important conferences on climate change and migration and year-end holidays loomed, a case of harassment that never got the traction it arguably deserved ended in a traditional UN way: it disappeared.

On Dec. 14, the chairman of the International Civil Service Commission, which regulates salaries and working conditions for staff members across the vast UN system, quietly resigned, after a year of dodging allegations that he had created a hostile and “unhealthy” environment for women who rejected his sexual advances.

The chairman of the commission, Kingston Rhodes of Sierra Leone, who held the rank of UN under secretary-general, was due to retire at the end of 2018, when his second term ended. His sudden, early resignation was exactly what the women who filed a complaint feared: Rhodes hung on and walked free. Four of those women had aired their allegations in a letter to Secretary-General António Guterres.

Rhodes’ staff even organized a farewell party for him, in place of a holiday party, and employees were urged to help defray the costs.

Thalif Deen, a correspondent at the UN for Inter Press Service, who was almost alone in his persistent reporting on the harassment story, wrote on Dec. 14 what women working for the commission had been predicting, “The UN’s heavily-hyped ‘zero tolerance’ policy on sexual abuse is being ridiculed once again.”

Equality Now, an international organization advocating for women’s rights, had been following the case for more than a year, since the allegations surfaced in November 2017. The organization had also formally asked for intervention by Guterres, who was reported to have said he found the allegations made by the women on the commission staff “credible.”

One complainant was Shihana Mohamed, a human-resources policies officer on the commission. In an interview with PassBlue last summer, she discussed several systemwide principles that she charged had been violated by Rhodes, who had created a “hostile” and threatening working environment.

While Rhodes — as an elected, not appointed, official — was not required to abide by some employee rules, one that he had at least publicly endorsed was a systemwide UN code of conduct. Under the heading “Harassment and abuse of authority,” it says:

“Harassment in any shape or form is an affront to human dignity and international civil servants must not engage in any form of harassment. International civil servants have the right to a workplace environment free of harassment or abuse. All organizations must prohibit any kind of harassment. Organizations have a duty to establish rules and provide guidance on what constitutes harassment and abuse of authority and how unacceptable behaviour will be addressed.

“International civil servants must not abuse their authority or use their power or position in a manner that is offensive, humiliating, embarrassing or intimidating to another person.”

The International Civil Service Commission, which has 15 commissioners from around the world and a staff of about 40 people, is not a remote body based far from the UN. It is across the street from UN headquarters in a building housing other UN offices. Yet for months, the UN Secretariat, including the office of the secretary-general, took the position that technically, the commission was an independent entity, having been created by the General Assembly and fully in charge of its own affairs.

Equality Now took issue with that explanation from the start. Yasmeen Hassan, the organization’s global executive director, said in a letter to Guterres in July, endorsed by nine other advocacy groups, “You are in a unique position to defend your staff against harassment, physical and psychological, by any others in the United Nations workplace.”

Although the complaint filed in November 2017 could have been acted on quickly, it took five months for the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the UN’s investigative arm, to begin considering the case and apparently to decide whether it had standing to investigate the commission.

When the investigation began, another seven months elapsed before it issued a report, according to the Inter Press Service, which has a global readership. The findings were sent to the commission in mid-December 2018 and have not been made public by that body or by the Secretariat.

Throughout the time that Rhodes was under investigation, he carried on blithely ignoring the complaints. For example, in a speech on July 9, he congratulated himself on the successes of his tenure.

“Twelve years ago when I was first appointed Chair of the Commission, I set out my vision for a revitalized Commission, which would reassert its leadership role and deepen engagement with the overall reform taking place in the organizations of the United Nations common system,” he said.

“At the time, I urged members of the Commission to recommit to the concept of a unified, high performing, merit-based international civil service which emphasizes and rewards performance. . . . Looking back, I take pride in seeing how much has been accomplished and the extent to which we were able to realise that vision together.”

Rhodes was allowed to continue in his post without interference from fellow commissioners or Guterres until less than two weeks from his scheduled retirement date. The details of what prompted his unexpected — earlier (so to speak) — resignation have not been made public.

He will be replaced as chairman by Larbi Djacta of Algeria. A member of the commission, Djacta is a diplomat who has also worked with UN peacekeeping.

After the resignation of Rhodes was announced, Shihana Mohamed, the complainant noted above and a leading figure in the campaign to expose the difficult conditions for women at the commission, publicized the details of her own experiences in a statement to Equality Now. She said, in an abridged version of her story:

“I was sexually harassed by the Chairman of the ICSC, Mr. Kingston Rhodes, for over 10 years — and I was not the only one,” Mohamed said. “Because I said NO to his repeated sexual advances, Mr. Rhodes denied me promotions, and excluded me from duty travels, training, assignments, projects, Commission sessions and working groups. In 2016, I was on sick leave for 3 months due to the stress caused by the hostile office environment and retaliation by the ICSC management.

“His quiet resignation just two weeks before the end of his term is a slap in my face and barely a slap on his wrist.”

The post Another UN Harassment Case Quietly Disappears appeared first on PassBlue.

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Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistan’s ambassador to the UN, presiding over a General Assembly session, May 5, 2017. In an interview, Lodhi said the UN imbued nations with a “spirit of cooperation.” Credit: UN/Photo

By Barbara Crossette
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 19 2017 (IPS)

When Maleeha Lodhi arrived at the United Nations in 2015 as Pakistan’s ambassador, she brought with her a broad background in academia, journalism and diplomacy: a Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics, where she later taught political sociology; the first woman to edit major newspapers in Pakistan; ambassador to the United States twice and once as Pakistan’s high commissioner in London.

In a sense, that background is all coming together at the UN.

While Lodhi’s diplomatic priority must be putting Pakistan’s interests first, she said in an interview in her office at the Pakistani UN mission on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she also finds time to focus on global perspectives, which makes the UN a great assignment.

From her base in New York, Lodhi stays actively involved in a number of international think tanks, including the Institute of Strategic Studies and the Middle East Center at the LSE, both in London. She is also a member of the UN Disarmament Commission and the global agenda council of the World Economic Forum.

In the interview, Lodhi ranged over Pakistan’s reputation in the UN arena, the increasing role of China in development across Asia, the rise of Islamophobia and the sad state of Western responses to an unprecedented world refugee crisis.

Although Pakistan’s national priorities remain predominant — Lodhi mentioned counterterrorism, sustainable economic development, relations with India and the decades-long impasse over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir — the UN has another 192 nations with their own interests. The rapid, spontaneous evolution of a new world order means every nation needs friends to meet the challenges.

“When you come to the UN, you see the priorities of other nations, and the dynamics at play, and the crises that are occurring,” she said. “The best thing about [the UN] is that it encourages a spirit of cooperation, and I think that’s extremely essential in the challenging times that we live in. The United Nations is about negotiating as part of a bloc of countries. No country here negotiates on its own for obvious reasons, because you need the support of other countries.”

The UN displays global changes in sharp relief, Lodhi suggested, and the West must recognize that these developments beg for a rethinking of old assumptions about international power structures.

“At a time when we see the rise of Asia — and this being described as Asia’s century — the West needs to go back to the drawing board and revisit the very notion of an international community,” she said.

Maleeha Lodhi was born into a well-to-do family in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab, and the center of the country’s cultural traditions and base for its most prominent human-rights activists and groups. That includes the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a nongovernmental group.

She has credited her career partly to her parents’ emphasis on education. But her personality came into play early. She is known to be tough but gracious, meticulous in her scholarship while outspoken in promoting Pakistan. An Indian commentator suggested that Lodhi may have been sent to the UN to keep India from getting a permanent Security Council seat, though the Council is a long way from reform and expansion.

Decades ago, Lodhi became a good friend and adviser to Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s first female prime minister, who first appointed her ambassador to the United States in 1993-1996. She served as ambassador to the US again, from 1999 to 2002, under the military government of President Pervez Musharraf.

Her years in Washington, and later in fellowships at Harvard and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, would have demonstrated to anyone that Pakistan had serious critics across the US government and research organizations.

Under Abdul Qadeer Khan, who headed Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Pakistan was found to have shared the technology he acquired while studying and working in Europe (or help given to him by China) with North Korea, Libya and Iran. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2004 for his black-market operations but pardoned almost immediately by General Musharraf and placed under house arrest until 2009.

Asked if Pakistan’s however-notorious past relations with North Korea and China, which is the country’s biggest development aid donor, had led to any outside requests for Pakistani information on the North Korean nuclear program or suggestions that Pakistani experts might be tapped to give advice with China on the current nuclear crisis with the Kim Jong Un regime, Lodhi said no.

Pakistan is often portrayed as an oppressive Islamic society, harsh on women and minorities, a record that is increasingly shared by neighboring India. The Pakistani government and intelligence services have also been accused of having created the Taliban, though little is said or remembered of Islamabad’s earlier hosting — with full US support — of the disparate armies of the Afghan mujahedeen, who took power after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. The remnants of these warlord-led militias in Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance continue to create political havoc in Kabul.

The attitude toward Pakistan is much more positive at the UN, Lodhi said.

“Contrary to the impression given by the negative media [particularly in the US], at the United Nations you’ll find the total antithesis. If you look at Pakistan’s position within this international community, it is one of enormous respect,” she said. She noted that the country has played a key role at the UN “on all three pillars: peace and security, human rights/humanitarian action and development.”

“We have consistently remained among the top three troop contributors to UN peacekeeping,” she said. “This has been the case since 1960 onwards.” Lodhi added that much of the current deployment of Pakistani soldiers is in Africa, “where they are needed most.”

On the humanitarian front, Lodhi points to Pakistan’s record on refugee assistance.

“We’ve always pointed out that the Western countries need to show a bigger heart,” she said. “They have a big wallet, but they need to match that wallet with a bigger heart. We didn’t have much of a wallet in Pakistan, but we continue to host over two million Afghan refugees. At the peak, we had more than three million. We continue to do that, and we’ve done that for 35 years.”

Pakistan, the world’s second-most-populous Muslim majority nation after Indonesia, plays a key role in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, and its voting bloc at the UN, Lodhi said. Among the concerns of Muslims, she said, are the unfulfilled resolutions on Kashmir, still a disputed territory between Pakistan and India; and on Palestine.

“There’s such a similarity between the cases of Palestine and Kashmir, both involving Muslim nations, both involving big power politics that stood in the way and continue to stand in the way of implementation of those resolutions.”

As a Muslim, Lodhi sees Islamophobia and xenophobia as “new forms of racial discrimination,” she said. “This is the contemporary expression of effort to discriminate against people of a certain faith who also happen to be people of a certain color. Here, also, Pakistan has been active at the United Nations, raising the issue.”

China looms large in the ambassador’s perception of the most significant global changes happening on the horizon, starting with the shifting relationship between Islamabad and Beijing.

“Traditionally, it was a defense and strategic dimension that was dominant in the relationship,” Lodhi said. “Now that relationship has morphed into a much more wide-based relationship. The defense-strategic relationship is there, but in addition, there is a very strong — I would say, much stronger — economic and investment orientation because Pakistan is the pivot of China’s One Belt, One Road. We hope to be the beneficiary in a mutually advantageous way.”

The Chinese initiative was announced in 2013 by President Xi Jinping. It is a breathtakingly ambitious program involving road, rail and sea links connecting traders and investors across Central Asia, parts of South and Southeast Asia, two seas — the South China Sea and Indian Ocean –and, ultimately, Europe.

The Chinese, who never think small or pay a lot of attention to critics, have wowed Pakistan, a longtime ally that sees itself as part of “the biggest economic initiative of the 21st century by any nation,” Lodhi said. “People still invoke the Marshall Plan as having in a way created a new paradigm and shifted a whole set of circumstances at that time. But this is gigantic by comparison. It’s not about aid and assistance. It’s about investment. It’s about trade. It’s about energy cooperation.

This has the potential of transforming all of Asia — certainly the 60 countries that are participating, thrusting them into a new era of prosperity and mutual cooperation.”

(*Brought to IPS readers courtesy of PassBlue, online independent coverage of the UN, a project of the Ralph Bunche Institute, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center)

Nikki Haley and the Egyptian ambassador to the UN, Amr Aboulatta, in the Security Council. Haley told Congress recently that Trump’s proposed budget for the UN put the world body “on notice.” Credit: RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO

By Barbara Crossette
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 29 2017 (IPS)

Five months into her stint as United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley faced two days of often-sharp questioning on June 27 and 28 by influential panels of the United States Congress. They demanded justification for the Trump administration’s decision to slash funding to the United Nations, particularly cuts to the UN Population Fund, Unicef, UN Women and the World Food Program.

Concerns were also raised about the wisdom of reducing the US budget contributions to peacekeeping from 27 percent to 25 percent (which cannot be done unilaterally without incurring arrears) and by squeezing peacekeeping missions around the world. Haley was proud to note that funds for the mission in Haiti were being cut by $150 million, though Secretary-General António Guterres just named Josette Sheeran, special envoy on cholera in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Cuts to US contributions to the International Atomic Energy Agency in an era of nuclear proliferations were also questioned.

Haley also proudly told Congressional members that the US got the UN General Assembly budget committee this month to reduce the annual peacekeeping budget. In fact, the US aimed for $1 billion in cuts but agreed to about half that amount, for a total yearly budget of $7.3 billion.

Paradoxically in her testimony in Congress, Haley bemoaned the lack of equipment for peacekeeping troops (the mission in Mali desperately needs armored tanks), which could be financed through a more generous UN budget and save lives.

The tone of questions asked to Haley by Congressional members may suggest that Trump’s 2018 budget will not get significant legislative support on UN-related issues, yet there remains a hard core of Republican legislators who — not always clear on facts or context on how the organization works — are dismissive and insulting. Among them and other groups, a strong pro-Israeli lobby continues to function and may have been strengthened by Trump’s team.

Haley acknowledged pressure from Israel — calling it “support” — that led to the US forcing Guterres, the secretary-general, to reverse the appointment in February of Salam Fayyad, a former Palestinian prime minister, as the UN’s special representative for Libya. Fayyad’s appointment apparently was not initially opposed by Haley. Asked by a member of Congress about the last-minute about-face in the US on Fayyad, Haley said that because Palestine was not recognized as a country by the US, a Palestinian should not be given an official UN post.

In this case, she said, appointing him would add to the UN’s “imbalance” against Israel. She would not say clearly whether Israel forced the change in the original US position or whether a Palestinian could ever be approved for a UN post.

On her first day testifying before Congress, Haley was questioned by a House of Representatives appropriations subcommittee dealing with funds for international organizations; on the second day, she faced the full House committee on foreign affairs. A consummate politician, Haley performed well, skirting some issues, although generally showing unwavering support for the Trump team and the president himself.

“We are on the same page,” Haley said of Trump, who seems to approve of her tough talk in the international arena and his voice at the UN. “I don’t go rogue on the president.”

Yet, she added later that “this administration does not tell me what to say or not to say.”

In an interesting interlude amid the questioning by appropriations committee members, Haley revealed that the most recent threat to Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad and his backers, Russia and Iran, should another Syrian chemical weapons attack occurred, was just a threat by the US, with no action planned.

The goal, she said, was “to send a message” not only to Syria but also to Russia and Iran to get them to “back off.”

On the zeroing out of US funds for Unicef from the proposed 2018 federal budget, about which members on both committees voiced a range of reactions — from disbelief and disappointment to shock and outrage — Haley breezily replied to one questioner that the “starting point” of the budget was to build up the military and look for cuts everywhere else.

She did not react when Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat from Virginia, asked whether the world’s children — through slashing Unicef — should have to pay for the US military buildup, saying it was “not a proud value that Americans would uphold.”

Members of Congress, many of them Democrats shut out of policymaking in a House of Representatives controlled by the Republican party, also wanted to know why the US appeared to have an incoherent foreign policy. They noted conflicting pronouncements in President Trump’s tweets and public flip-flops; measured statements by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; and declarations by Haley that seemed to be her own opinion at times.

Putting it mildly, the US has become “unpredictable,” a legislator said.

Pressed to describe her relations with her bosses in Washington, Haley revealed to the foreign affairs committee that she rarely talked with Trump or Tillerson and had no information on the unusual number of vacancies in the US State Department. She said that her closest relationship was with the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, the defense secretary; James Mattis, with whom she spoke on issues concerning the UN; and others in the president’s cabinet, of which she is a member.

“We work as a team,” she said, adding that there was “a very organized process in place.”

On Russia, Haley stuck to her strong objections to the invasion of Crimea and Moscow’s incursions into eastern Ukraine, and accepted that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election. She insisted, however, that Trump was not involved in colluding with the election interference. Asked whether she had discussed with Trump the Russian involvement in the election, possibly at the direction or President Vladimir Putin, Haley said that topic had not come up because it was not a UN matter.

Haley faced many questions on the rationale for the total defunding by the Trump administration of the UN Population Fund, or UNFPA. The most persistent questioners came from Democrats, but they were not alone. Haley responded that there was nothing she could do about the full loss of funds from the US to UNFPA since it had been done by presidential order. She insisted that the money saved, about $70 million by current calculations, would go to similar US aid programs.

Those programs, however, strictly bar US funding for any international organization or NGO that assists or even counsels on abortion. Reflecting her lack of interest about the loss of money to UNFPA, she was asked how maternal health care was being replaced by the UN agency in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, which she just visited. Although she admitted she didn’t know, she said the next day in Congress “I always just meet with women” when she had visited the refugee camps in Jordan and Turkey.

The Trump administration (and the George W. Bush administration) used debunked reports that the Population Fund’s work in China supported forced abortions there to stop financing the agency. Haley repeated the claim, but told the appropriations subcommittee that the UNFPA was “associated” with a “company” in China that was guilty of involuntary “sterilization.” She did not repeat that formulation in the foreign affairs hearings, but Lois Frankel, a Democrat from Florida, called the China reason a “totally phony excuse.”

“A lot of women are going to suffer,” said Ami Bera, a Democrat from California and medical doctor, said about the cuts to the Population Fund.

Much of the hearings were consumed by repeated questions and criticisms of the Human Rights Council. Haley repeated what she said in her confirmation hearing in January about the Council needing to be “fixed.” She has never said plainly that the US is considering withdrawing from the 47-nation body. But in Geneva in June, Haley, saying she had come to see the Council firsthand, made a brief appearance (about three minutes) in the chamber to announce her presence.

Later that day in a speech to the Graduate Institute of Geneva, she warned that the US could “go outside” the Council to protect human rights if two nonnegotiable conditions were not met.

In that speech, Haley demanded that the Council change its election procedures (which would have to be done by the General Assembly) to “keep the worst human rights abusers from obtaining seats on the Council.” That would mean the open election of Council members, who are now chosen regionally by consensus, or horse-trading.

“As it stands, elections for membership to the Council are over before the voting even begins,” she said. “No competition means no scrutiny of candidates’ human rights records. We must change the elections so countries are forced to make the case for membership based on their records, not on their promises.”

Her second demand was that a Council agenda provision — known as Item 7 — which perennially singles out Israel for condemnation, “must be removed.” That command has garnered wide bipartisan support in the US, and American diplomats have been successful in recent years in reducing the number of obsessive resolutions on this issue, which will not be open to debate again until 2020. In Congress, Haley pointed to Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as providing the “hard core support” for Item 7.

Haley had no problem defending Trump’s decision to quit the Paris Agreement on climate change. “We are not going to throw climate out the window,” she said, adding: “What the president did was in the best interest of businesses and the best interest of our country.”

To which Connolly, the representative from Virginia, proclaimed that Trump’s decision put the US in the same boat as Nicaragua and Syria.

(*Brought to IPS readers courtesy of PassBlue, online independent coverage of the UN, a project of the Ralph Bunche Institute, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center)

Rex Tillerson, US secretary of state, right, who presided over the UN Security Council session on North Korea’s nuclear threats, with Yun Byung-se, his South Korean counterpart, April 28, 2017. Tillerson demanded that all UN member states must abide by UN sanctions on North Korea. Credit: RICK BAJORNAS/UN PHOTO

By Barbara Crossette
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 29 2017 (IPS)

Speaking to the United Nations Security Council at a meeting on North Korea held at the foreign-minister level, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked member countries to join the United States in a strong campaign to enhance pressures on the Kim Jong-un regime, whose rapidly developing nuclear and missile programs have reached dangerous levels.

The high-level diplomatic session took place on April 28, the final day of the American presidency of the Security Council, a monthly rotating position. The atmosphere signaled that the US was back and needed partners after months of disparaging the UN and insulting various UN member countries.

All 15 Council members read statements at the session, in addition to South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se. North Korean diplomats did not participate in the Council session. But as if to underline the menacing if predictable behavior of the regime, it fired a missile, which apparently failed, not long after the Council’s meeting ended.

The tone of Tillerson’s address to the Council was much more measured than the freewheeling style of Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, who said on her first day in the job that she would “take names” and later threatened to use her high heels for kicking those who opposed American policies. (The heels reference was used when she was governor of South Carolina, referring to labor organizers.)

She also compared the UN with the South Carolina state legislature for its clubbiness when she was governor, yet she promoted a fellow state governor to become head of the UN’s World Food Program. PassBlue obtained the letter she wrote to UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Haley had promised to “fix” things at the UN as well. “I like to fix things,” she told the US Senate Foreign Relations committee at her confirmation hearing in January.

Hints that a new approach by the US toward world politics may be forming, perhaps led by Tillerson, followed a week of extraordinary chaos in an already chaotic White House. President Donald Trump, still lacking a coherent foreign policy of his own, flailed around for a single domestic success he could advertise on his 100th day in office.

He tried and failed again to get a new national health care bill and threw out an ill-considered American tax-reform outline that ran into a buzzsaw of criticism from experts who called it a gift to the rich.

The week of chaos began on April 24 with a White House lunch for all Security Council ambassadors and their spouses, in which the idea of a presidential “we need you” surfaced and praise for the UN Secretary-General Guterres was made by Trump, according to a diplomat at the meeting. Tillerson was not present at the lunch, but Haley sat at the president’s side.

Curiously, Trump tried to make a joke about her tenure in New York, thanking her for her “outstanding leadership” and then asking Council members: “Does everybody like Nikki? Because if you don’t she can easily be replaced. No, we won’t do that. I promise.”

Still, Trump inadvertently raised suspicions about whether Haley will be reined in by Tillerson, who is slowly but surely reorganizing his department and takes a cautious approach to his diplomacy so far. Reports soon emerged that Haley may be required to have her public statements pre-approved by the State Department, but whether she agrees remains to be seen.

Four days later, on April 28, Tillerson’s message in the Security Council session on North Korea was about partnership, stressing not only American fears — the stock rhetoric of the Trump White House — but also the anxieties of Asian nations and the wider world. “The more we bide our time, the sooner we will run out of it,” Tillerson said to a chamber full of UN ambassadors, whom he thanked for their presence. “I urge this Council to act before North Korea does.”

Tillerson’s demand for action — beginning “today,” he said — included familiar complaints from Washington; for example, doing a better job of enforcing UN resolutions aimed at bringing North Korea to a nuclear stand-down. He called for new financial sanctions on anyone, individual or country, who is supporting or abetting North Korea in its nuclear and missile development — thus defying the sanctions regime, the strictest set imposed by the UN on a member country. No higher-level sanctions on, say, digital activities that violate UN penalties, were mentioned.

He also asked all 193 UN member nations to “suspend or downgrade diplomatic relations with North Korea,” saying that the regime of Kim Jong-un was exploiting its diplomatic openings and privileges to fund its technology programs, particularly for its military. And he emphasized the importance of imposing bans on North Korean imports, especially coal. He called for suspending the guest-worker program that bring laborers into various countries who can become agents of the Kim Jong-un regime.

He singled out China. “We must all do our share, but with China accounting for 90 percent of North Korean trade, China alone has economic leverage over Pyongyang that is unique, and its role is therefore particularly important,” Tillerson said. “The US and China have held productive exchanges on this issue, and we look forward to further actions that build on what China has already done.”

Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China, in his address to the Council, refused to accept that it was up to his country alone to solve the North Korea problem. “The key to solving the nuclear issue on the peninsula does not lie in the hands of the Chinese side,” he said. China has preferred to deal with the North Korea issue in multination talks, although these have gained little ground in the past.

The Chinese minister told the media before the Council session that his country’s priorities are denuclearization of North Korea, upholding the nonproliferation regime there, peace talks and not to allow “chaos or war to break out on the peninsula.”

Tillerson repeated the long-held position that “all options” were on the table in dealing with North Korea, as Vice President Mike Pence repeated throughout his trip to Northeast Asia.

“Diplomatic and financial levers of power will be backed by a willingness to counteract North Korean aggression with military action, if necessary,” Tillerson said. But he did not repeat Trump’s recent offhand remark that he would meet with Kim Jong-un if the situation required it. Nor did he refer to the cyberwarfare powers that the US has at its disposal, which Washington does not confirm or deny have been used to abort or destroy North Korean missiles after their launchings.

Russia, for its part, emphasized the toll that sanctions took on ordinary North Koreans and said that although Russia was united in condemning in North Korea’s missile launchings, the government won’t give up its nuclear program as long as it feels threatened by US naval exercises in the region.

Speaking to the Council first, Guterres of the UN described North Korea’s nuclear tests and missile firings in recent years as “clear violations of Security Council resolutions.”

He pointed out that these actions have violated numerous international agreements, including maritime law and aviation regulations.

Moreover, Guterres said, “The International Atomic Energy Agency remains unable to access the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] to verify the status of its nuclear program,” though it does have sophisticated satellite monitoring in place.

“The DPRK is the only country to have conducted nuclear tests in this century,” Guterres noted. “We must assume that, with each test or launch. The DPRK continues to make technological advances in its pursuit of a military nuclear capability. . . . The onus is on the DPRK to comply with its international obligations. At the same time, the international community must also step up its efforts to manage and reduce tensions.”

In his concluding remarks, speaking as the US representative and not the Council presiding officer, Tillerson re-emphasized the crucial importance of a truly international effort beyond the calls for more negotiations.

“We will not negotiate our way back to the negotiating table with North Korea,” he said. “We will not reward their violations of past resolutions. We will not reward their bad behavior with talks. We will only engage in talks with North Korea when they exhibit a good-faith commitment to abiding by the Security Council resolutions and their past promises to end their nuclear programs.

“And that is why we must have full and complete compliance by every country to the resolutions that have been enacted by this body in the past — no relaxation in the vigorous implementation of sanctions. . . . Any failure to take action diminishes your vote for these resolutions of the past, and diminishes your vote for future resolutions, and it devalues your seat at this Council. We must have full, complete compliance by all members of the Council.”

Leaving the Council after the hourslong session and skirting the media throng outside the chamber, Tillerson walked with Haley to the US mission to the UN across the street, where Council members were treated to lunch.

(Brought to IPS readers courtesy of PassBlue, online independent coverage of the UN, a project of the Ralph Bunche Institute, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center)

A memorial service for a UN peacekeeper, Corp. Khalid El Hasnaoui of Morocco, April 20, 2016, in the Central African Republic. Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, above, leads the mission there. Credit: UN PHOTO

By Barbara Crossette
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 18 2017 (IPS)

The Trump administration, buoyed by a powerful anti-internationalist movement among conservative Republicans in the United States Congress, is headed for a new confrontation with the United Nations over who decides how much the US should pay for peacekeeping.

With a tentative US budget deadline of April 28 fast approaching, it is almost certain that American arrears will mount again, after the Obama administration closed the funding gap.

At the same time, a broad campaign against UN peacekeeping, reflecting current thinking in the US government, is also being waged in the Security Council by Ambassador Nikki Haley.

In her short time on the Council, she has never missed an opportunity to declare that the US will pay no more than 25 percent of the peacekeeping budget, down from about 28 percent. Haley, whose formal education is in accountancy, has also said that she will be looking hard at UN peacekeeping missions to cut costs, although this is still part of a learning curve for her.

Until recently, Haley seemed surprised to hear that troop-contributing countries were compensated by the UN for use of their soldiers.

The US position today is part of an historical cycle of standoffs that began in the 1980s and peaked during the administration of Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. That is when an earlier wave of anti-internationalism, led most prominently by the late Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, exerted its influence.

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms reveled in disparaging and insulting the UN, while forcing a politically weakened Clinton to make significant changes in US institutions working in international affairs, including the abolition of an independent Arms Control Agency.

At the time, the US contribution to the annual peacekeeping budget was assessed by the UN at about 31 percent, down from just under 40 percent assessed in the early years of the world body. In 1995, however, Congress passed a law putting a cap of 25 percent on payment of UN peacekeeping dues, and arrears in hundreds of millions of dollars began to accumulate.

By 1999, when the US was in danger of losing its vote in the UN General Assembly, the Helms-Biden agreement (Joseph Biden, a senator then, was the ranking Democrat on the committee) set up a timetable to start paying $926 million in arrears to the UN and other international organizations.

The UN-US calculations and gaps have seesawed ever since. In the early years of the George W. Bush administration, the US cap was raised several times by Congress as arrears were being reduced. In fact, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency in 2009, the US budget cap on payments was higher, at 27.1 percent, than the UN assessment of 25.9 percent.

At the end of the Obama years, the US payment ceiling was set at 28.57 percent, according to figures from the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. The UN assessment stood a little lower, at 28.3 percent.

Payments to the UN are drawn from sections of the US State Department budget, which Trump has promised to slash by about 31 percent, a figure that Congress, which writes the budget, is likely to oppose — or temper. The UN’s peacekeeping budget for 2016-2017 was $7.2 billion to $7.89 billion, depending on whose figures are used.

A Republican-led Congress — especially the House of Representative — could argue that all the adjustments made over the years were one-off annual temporary measures that merely tinkered with the 1995 law capping US payments to peacekeeping at 25 percent. Along those lines, all that Congress would have to do is reaffirm the 1995 legislation to meet Trump’s 25 percent. The US would automatically fall back into default.

To describe the process by which the UN sets assessment and dues scales as Byzantine would be making it sound easy. It starts with the UN Charter, which mandated in Article 17 that all member nations contribute to budget expenses. There has been no dispute since 2000 over US dues to the UN’s regular operating budget, for which the US is assessed 22 percent, the highest payment of any nation. The American issue is with peacekeeping dues only.

In assessing peacekeeping rates, the central role is played by the 18-member UN General Assembly Committee on Contributions (separate from the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions, the ACABQ, which a previous Take a Look report on the US-UN budget crisis erroneously said was responsible).

Peacekeeping dues are calculated from the base of each nation’s regular budget assessments. A number of factors are then taken into account, including the strength of the national economy, measured in gross national income (GNI) and GNI per capita. Some poor countries receive a discount on their regular budget rate.

The biggest discounts go to least-developed countries (LDCs) , which get 90 percent knocked off their regular budget rate when peacekeeping dues are decided. Countries with high per capita income get no discount.

The permanent five members of the Security Council, or P5 — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — are a special case. Those nations, which can veto or alter proposed peacekeeping resolutions and other measures in the Council, are assessed at a premium rate.

This means that the sum of all discounts given to other countries are added pro rata to the regular budget rates of the P5 to determine what they will be charged for peacekeeping.

Peacekeeping rates and discounts may be recalculated and changed only every three years by the General Assembly, based on advice from the Committee on Contributions. The next major review takes place in 2018. Until then, annual “technical” reviews are held. The 2017 session for this year’s review is in June.

The US government will have to adhere to these timetables and work with the UN in New York throughout the coming months. But as the rules stand now, no major changes can be made on rates until the next three-year review.

The US will remain the world’s largest economy during this period, and there will not be much sympathy around the UN for the Trump administration as the dues argument burgeons. The US already pays less than it should because of previous budget deals.

Even before the Trump cuts kick in, only 1.4 percent of the US federal budget is devoted to foreign aid of all kinds. Within that total, American peacekeeping and regular budget dues to the UN combined account for a minuscule 0.2 percent of the US national budget.

(Brought to IPS readers courtesy of PassBlue, online independent coverage of the UN, a project of the Ralph Bunche Institute, City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center)