The invasion of Iraq by the US in , which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers. The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force. The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than , lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State. The UN brokered the Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins.
Tragedy: millions of refugees continue to live outside their homelands in camps with numbers rising in recent years largely due to the Syrian conflict. Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands.
This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries. While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change. Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories. Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high.
For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges — of which climate change is foremost — that we face today. Our Stories.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act. Both are desirable but neither will happen soon — or fix the deeper problem.
This year, a successor to Ban Ki-moon will be appointed. An independent secretary general would long ago have demanded a ceasefire in Syria with clearly spelt-out consequences, including coercive sanctions, for those who breached it.
The secretary general would need the freedom to appoint a strong, experienced team, with appointment on merit and not the traditional divvying-up of senior jobs among the P5, a practice that institutionalises their unhealthy dominance, not only within the council but also of the secretariat and the information it conveys to the council.
Officials have admitted that certain UN reports are edited by permanent members before delivery to the security council I did it myself once. In recent years, it was confrontation over Kashmir that brought the world closest to nuclear war, yet mention of this hotspot is tacitly prohibited too.
The UN investigations into its failure to prevent mass killings in Rwanda, Srebrenica and Sri Lanka all identified serial weaknesses, both political and institutional.
But no one should be confident that such tragedies will be competently addressed in future. The need for a brave and decisive new secretary general is literally a matter of life and death, in fact many deaths.
Despite the claim that the security council now holds more public meetings than ever, the vast majority of its substantive negotiations are conducted in private. I spent four and a half years in the council and never saw a good reason why most of its deliberations should remain closed to public scrutiny except to disguise the frequent superficiality and poverty of its debates though occasionally privacy may help negotiation.
Televising parliaments has improved democracy. Diplomats should be judged by what they say: a weak form of accountability but an improvement on its total absence today. Transparency in the diplomatic dealings at the UN would render the resulting decisions more comprehensible and thus legitimate. The public would be more engaged, for instance, when the council discusses aid delivery to besieged towns in Syria. People might begin to care about what happens at the UN.
The organisation has grown so big that at times it is working against itself. Critics point to large numbers of support staff doing ill-defined jobs. Cooperation between different UN agencies has been hindered by competition for funding, mission creep and by outdated business practices, a report said. In some sectors, such as water and energy, more than 20 UN agencies are active and compete for limited resources without a clear collaborative framework.
More than 30 UN agencies and programmes have a stake in environmental management. The United Nations has established several programmes and funds to address particular humanitarian and development concerns. Thereafter the focus kept shifting—arms control, Israeli Palestine conflict, weapons of mass destruction, development, human rights, peace keeping, equality among nations, prevention of genocide, war crimes. As the world changes, so do its priorities. Today we are more worried about terrorism, climate change, sustainable development, pandemics, but the international architecture, determined by a few, has remained the same.
In , the German Foreign Minister warned that the western world, as virtually everyone alive today has known it, will almost certainly perish before our eyes. The main challenges before United Nations in are to define the rules of changing power equations, manage the transition from a western-dominated world to a more equitable one, create a global order that roots out terrorism, save our planet from mutation and utilize our remaining resources for the benefit of everybody.
The existing world order is dying, the new one is struggling to be born. Should the United Nations be buried? It was missing in action during the Chinese virus attack. Its agencies such as the World Health Organization are relics whose expiry date is long over. The veto power is criticized for its undemocratic nature. For a racket like the United Nations, the attractions of the location of its headquarters, New York, far outweigh the utility of the organization.
It is not enough to take refuge in meaningless phrases like we need the UN, if it is not there, we must invent it etc. What we need is a head-to-toe examination of this body from its dandruff to its corns. Permanent members of the Security Council all expect to have a senior person from their country around the UN table, even apart from the mouthwatering daily allowances.
It is incredible that in the United Nations, which produces negotiating texts on every other area it deals with, has just not been able to put a text on the table in Security Council reform. It ticked off criticism which said the UN was badly failing those it was supposed to help.
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