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Wed Aug 31 11:27:04 PDT 2005

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CRUNCH TIME FOR UN REFORM
Aug 31st 2005  

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.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4335571&fsrc=nwl

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