UN Reform

Author: Simon Stander

Originally Published at Peace and Conflict Monitor on: 12/08/2004

Category: Editorial

On 2 December 2004, the high-level panel of reform of
the UN reported to Kofi Annan. The panel was indeed high-level, but,
interestingly, excluded anyone from the academic world:

 

Anand Panyarachun (Chairman), former
Prime Minister of Thailand

Robert Badinter (France)

Joao Clemente Baena Soares
(Brazil)

Gro Harlem Brundtland
(Norway)

Mary Chinery-Hesse (Ghana)

Gareth Evans (Australia)

Lord David Hannay (United Kingdom)

Enrique Iglesias (Uruguay)

Amre Moussa (Egypt)

Satish Nambiar (India)

Sadako Ogata (Japan)

Yevgenii Primakov (Russia)

Qian Qichen (China)

Nafis Sadik (Pakistan)

Salim Ahmed Salim (Tanzania)

Brent Scowcroft (United
States)

 

 

Among its primary recommendations
are:

 

• The principle of “responsibility to protect” is
  proposed which would allow intervention in the internal affairs of countries
  that might otherwise allow genocide, breed terrorism or be faced with
  famine.

 

• The Security Council should be enlarged to 24
  members but the current five members (all represented on the panel) would keep
  their vetoes and no new member would be allowed one.

 

The Report is entitled A more secure world: Our
Shared Responsibility. It identifies six clusters of threats
Viz:

• war between States;
• violence within States, including civil wars,
  large-scale human rights abuses and genocide;
• poverty, infectious disease and environmental
  degradation;
• nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological
  weapons;
• terrorism;
• and transnational organized
  crime.

 

 

Development is put first as the major pre-requisite
in making the world a safer place:

 

“Development has to be the first line of defence for
a collective security system that takes prevention seriously. Combating
poverty will not only save millions of lives but also strengthen States’
capacity to combat terrorism, organized crime and proliferation. Development
makes everyone more secure. There is an agreed international framework for how
to achieve these goals, set out in the Millennium Declaration and the Monterrey Consensus, but
implementation lags.”

 

Of course, defining development is problematic. As
far as the high-level Report is concerned”development” is synonymous with the
eradication of poverty. That, in itself, is contentious. Massive amelioration of
the effects of poverty would create a better world: that it would make the world
more secure is a leap of faith, but a worthwhile leap.

 

The Report in five languages can be found at http://www.un.org/secureworld/

Footnote:

Bio: