Crunch time for UN reform

Aug 31st 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

America has requested extensive last-minute changes to a draft agreement on reforming and modernising the United Nations. Painful negotiations lie ahead of next month’s summit of world leaders

IF THERE was still any question that America is taking a new line with the United Nations, the answer now seems clear. Next month, 175 world leaders will gather in New York to consider a raft of reforms for the world body. But just weeks before the summit is to begin, America has asked for extensive changes to the draft “outcome document” that many other negotiators felt was almost finished. Many detect the hand of John Bolton, America’s controversial new ambassador to the UN, who offered the proposed changes on Wednesday August 24th. But Mr Bolton is probably more symptom than cause—George Bush sent him to the UN as a signal that business-as-usual would no longer be acceptable.

There is talk of crisis in many of the media reports about America’s proposed changes. The Washington Post reported that 750 such edits had been made to the draft outcome document. In truth, the majority of these are nitpicking wording changes that have little effect on the content. But some of them would change the declaration considerably, particularly regarding development efforts and intervention to stop human-rights catastrophes.

September’s summit, billed by the UN as the biggest gathering of world leaders in history, was originally to be a five-year review of the 2000 Millennium Summit, the most notable product of which was the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These include worthy aims such as halving abject poverty and achieving universal primary education by 2015. As desirable as these goals are, there seems little hope of achieving the panoply of policy objectives embedded in the MDGs; the UN itself is already complaining about the lack of progress.

The proposed American edits to the document remove nearly all references to the MDGs, referring instead to more vaguely worded “internationally agreed development goals”. In place of the MDGs, America wants to put more emphasis on the “Monterrey Consensus”, the result of a 2002 summit in Mexico which concluded that developing countries need to take more responsibility for their own growth by fighting corruption, improving their investment climates and making their countries generally more hospitable to economic activity.

Such market-friendly ideas have become the vogue not only in America but among the non-governmental organisations fighting poverty around the world. They have belatedly recognised that tens of billions of dollars in aid over recent decades have failed to curb extreme poverty in much of the world, especially Africa. Those countries that have made the greatest strides against poverty, most notably India and China, but also countries like South Korea and Taiwan, have done so largely by making their own economies suitable for investment and growth.

But developing countries, as well as many UN officials and rich-world governments, believe that substantial aid is required too. For reasons of geography and history, they argue, Africa is in a “poverty trap” that no amount of internal reforms will solve without aid. Thus the draft summit document included a call for rich countries to aim to give 0.7% of their GDP in assistance.

It is this kind of language that America wants removed. In a slightly defensive letter to other ambassadors sent on Friday, Mr Bolton said that despite its deletion of every reference to the MDGs, America did in fact support them, so long as they were taken to mean outcomes (eg, halving poverty) and not inputs (such as the aid target, which America never agreed to). The blizzard of negative publicity last week may have put some pressure even on America’s fierce ambassador.

The diplomatic problem is that the countries of the developing world, represented by the “G77” group, see a strong focus on aid and the MDGs as their price for agreeing to the rich world’s—especially America’s—agenda. That agenda includes an overhaul of management and oversight within the UN’s own house, to prevent, for example, fraud like the recent and humiliating oil-for-food scandal. The developing countries may only agree to proposed American reforms like this if tempted by a promise of sizeable and predictable aid flows. If the Americans are going to propose 750 amendments, the G77 might respond in kind.

Am I my brother’s peacekeeper?

Besides the shift in language on development, the edited American draft significantly weakens a section on the so-called “responsibility to protect”. Following the genocide in Rwanda and the NATO-led intervention in Kosovo, international lawyers have sought to secure language promoting humanitarian intervention to stop atrocities. The original draft called on states to acknowledge their responsibility to prevent such crimes against humanity, and to aid the UN in establishing an “early-warning” system to halt disasters-in-the-making. When states fail in this duty to protect their citizens, the drafters declared that the rest of the world “has the obligation” to act, and invited permanent members of the Security Council not to veto any such intervention.

In the first set of changes to the draft document, all this langauge was cut by American editors—State Department lawyers trying to avoid legal commitments and Pentagon strategists fearing some kind of automatic requirement of American arms to stop catastrophes. Instead, the American version simply said that outside countries should be “prepared to act”. The superpower’s critics quickly noted that it had once again lined up alongside a rogue's gallery of badly behaved states to oppose a human-rights agreement: in this case Pakistan, Egypt, Cuba, Iran and Syria.

But as with the development clauses, the American position has since softened somewhat. A letter from Mr Bolton this week suggests inserting language that the world has a “moral responsibility” to act to stop large-scale crimes against humanity. But the American ambassador remains opposed to creating a legal responsibility, which could, he argues, inappropriately predetermine the means to be used. In any case, his letter points out, the Security Council already has the power to authorise intervention. In a further concession, America has re-inserted support for a new UN-based “early-warning system” into its proposed text.

So even though many still worry that this section of the draft has been fatally weakened, the vaguer American version of "responsibility to protect" would be the first-ever clear international agreement that outside countries should be willing to act to stop atrocities in a country whose government cannot or will not stop them itself. This could form the political basis for a future intervention, possibly even military intervention, should the Security Council be presented with a case like the slaughter in Sudan's Darfur region.

The atmosphere is therefore not as bad as some of the more breathless talk of crisis indicates. Nonetheless, America has annoyed many with some seemingly needless niggling points—cutting “respect for nature” from a legally meaningless laundry-list of the world’s basic values, for example. Critics say that the deletion is emblematic: America is taking an overly lawyerly approach to a non-binding political document on which all have made compromises. An American spokesman responds that “mumbo-jumbo” does no one any good, and that America may support a shorter statement instead of the current 36-page draft.

Time is now limited. A document must be substantially complete before national leaders show up on September 14th, and there remains procedural wrangling about which countries (approximately 30) should be in a core group negotiating these last-minute changes. Diplomats are firing up their coffee pots, preparing to work through nights and weekends. It will be a long and harrowing two weeks. But everyone agrees that the UN needs reform. Failure to achieve consensus in September would be a sadly wasted opportunity for all concerned.

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