Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Canada and the World Backgrounder

Change 101: Secretary-General Kofi Annan is proposing complete reform of the United Nations; the experts he appointed to make suggestions have concentrated on what the UN does rather than on who does it.

Article Excerpt
The United Nations is broken and it needs to be fixed. You'd be hard pressed to find anybody who disagreed with that statement. Some say it's so badly broken that it's beyond repair; others believe the organization can be rebuilt.

Kofi Annan is among the rebuilders. He's the secretary-general of the United Nations, the person who runs the whole operation. In his annual report to the UN General Assembly in 2003 Mr. Annan said: "Rarely have such dire forecasts been made about the UN. We have reached a fork in the road ... a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the UN was founded."

What prompted the secretary-general to speak in such terms was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq six months earlier. The attack was in defiance of international law.

Under the UN's own rules no country may attack another country, except in self-defence, without the approval of the Security Council. The United States did not have Security Council approval for the use of military force against Iraq.

This was just the latest in a long series of failures. The United Nations was set up to "save future generations from the scourge of war." But, the decades since the organization's birth have been among the most war-torn in history. Countries have repeatedly taken up arms against one another (as many as 680 times between 1945 and 1989, by one estimate). Hundreds more conflicts have occurred within nations.

In an attempt to correct this situation, Kofi Annan appointed a High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. He wanted this group of senior diplomats to come up with "new ideas about the kinds of policies and institutions required for the UN to be effective in the 21st century."

The 16-member panel first analyzed the threats the world faces (see sidebar). Then, it looked at how the United Nations is responding to those threats. The panel's conclusion is--not very well. Finally, the panel members tackled the problem of how better to respond and came up with 101 recommendations.

The most important of these is prevention.

The global public health system needs to be improved; the panel says it is currently "ill-equipped to protect us against existing and emerging deadly infectious diseases." It also points out that the "International response to HIV/AIDS was shockingly late and shamefully ill-resourced."

"Development has to be the first line of defence for a collective security system that takes prevention seriously. Combatting poverty will not only save millions of lives but also strengthen states' capacity to combat terrorism, organized crime, and [nuclear] proliferation. Development makes everyone more secure."

Both those preventive measures cost money--lots of it. The world's rich countries seem to have only a moderate appetite for this kind of spending. The G8 Summit in July 2005 pledged increased aid to developing countries, but nowhere near what anti-poverty activists were calling for....

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!