UNITED NATIONS @ 75

Why United Nations is in news

The United Nations completed 75 years this year. In order to commemorate the historic moment, world leaders come together, at a one-day high-level meeting of the UN General Assembly. The meeting, themed as ‘’The Future We Want, the UN We Need: Reaffirming our Collective Commitment to Multilateralism’, is a landmark event, as for the first time in 75 years, the 193-member body would be holding the session virtually on account of the Covid-19 outbreak.

What is United Nations

Presently, the United Nations (UN) comprises 193 States.  As an international inter-governmental organization (IGO), it serves as a framework for cooperative  problem solving amongst states, and in recent years has  taken on additional political, social, economic and technological issues facing humanity in general. Its core concern with promoting peace and security has been supplemented, over time, by an ever-expanding economic and social agenda

The UN has a very broad and substantive scope characterized by a decentralized system with several specialized agencies, organized around six principal organs, namely;

• The Security Council,
• The General Assembly,
• The Economic and Social Council,
• The Trusteeship Council,
• The International Court of Justice (ICJ), and
• The Secretariat

Need behind the set-up of the UN and its evolution:

The UN was born out of the ashes of yet another international organisation created with the intention of keeping war away. The League of Nations was created in June 1919, after World War I, as part of the Treaty of Versailles. However, when the Second World War broke out in 1939, the League closed down and its headquarters in Geneva remained empty throughout the war.

Consequently, in August 1941, American president Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill held a secret meeting aboard naval ships in Placenta Bay, located in the southeast coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The heads of the two countries discussed the possibility of creating a body for international peace effort and a range of issues related to the war. Together they issued a statement that came to be called the Atlantic Charter. It was not a treaty, but only an affirmation that paved the way for the creation of the UN. It declared the realisation of “certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they based their hopes for a better future for the world.”

The United States joined the war in December 1941, and for the first time the term ‘United Nations’ was coined by president Roosevelt to identify those countries which were allied against the axis powers. On January 1, 1942, representatives of 26 allied nations met in Washington DC to sign the declaration of the United Nations, which basically spelled out the war objectives of the Allied powers.

Over the next couple of years, several meetings took place to decide on the post-war charter that would describe the precise role of the United Nations.

The United Nations finally came into existence on October 24, 1945 after being ratified by 51 nations, which included five permanent members (France, the Republic of China, the Soviet Union, the UK and the US) and 46 other signatories. The first meeting of the General Assembly took place on January 10, 1946.

The four main goals of the UN included maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, achieving international cooperation in solving international problems and being at the center for harmonising the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends

The following are the Purposes of the UN, as stated in Article 1, Chapter I of its Charter:

1)  To maintain international peace and security, and to that end:to  take  effective collective  measures  for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means, and in conformity with the principles of justice and international law, adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace.

2)  To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace.

3)  To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and forfundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

4)  To be a center for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends.

The UN boasts of several significant achievements in the last 75 years:

It has also expanded its scope to resolve over a large number of global issues such as health, environment, and women empowerment among others such as:

• Soon after its formation, it passed a resolution to commit to the elimination of nuclear weapons in 1946.
• In 1948, it created the World Health Organisation (WHO) to deal with communicable diseases like smallpox, malaria, HIV. At present the WHO is the apex organisation dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
• In 1950, the UN created the High Commissioner for Refugees to take care of the millions who had been displaced due to World War II.
• It continues to be on the frontlines of crises faced by refugees from countries across the world.
• In 1972, the UN environment programme was created.
• In 2002, the UN established the UN criminal court to try those who have committed war crimes, genocide, and other atrocities.
• Belgian-Congo crisis of 1960-63, provided another avenue for the UN to intervene in an intrastate conflict, to make peace.
• The hasty partition of India and Pakistan heralded conflict between the two new states over Kashmir in 1947, following British withdrawal. The UN was able to broker a ceasefire by January 1949 and subsequently deployed a military observer group (UNMOGIP) to maintain the cease- fire.
• Its non-military activities have increased over the years, to the extent that its other specialized agencies, especially those under the ECOSOC, are increasingly involved in the area of preventive diplomacy, through humanitarian interventions, poverty alleviation and health matters, designed to stem the occurrence of conflict and lower the level of tensions, especially in weak and failing states.
• Additionally, its operations were supported by 6,000 international civilian personnel, 13,000 local civilian personnel and over 2,000 volunteer workers, with the budget for its 2008-09 operations alone amounting to 7.1 billion dollars

The UN has also met with its share of criticisms.

• In 1994, for instance, the organization failed to stop the Rwandan genocide. The UN was accused of being a bystander to genocide in the shameful cases of Rwanda and Srebrenica in 1993. Indeed, these failures prompted the UN to do a self-assessment and commissioned the Brahimi Panel to examine its peace operations
• In 2005, UN peacekeeping missions were accused of sexual misconduct in the Republic of Congo, and similar allegations have also come from Cambodia and Haiti.
• In 2011, the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan was unsuccessful in eliminating the bloodshed caused in the civil war that broke out in 2013.
• The UN was a powerless spectator in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis that nearly plunged the world into a nuclear war, just as it could not earlier, in 1956, 1968 and 1979, prevent the then Soviet Union from invading Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan respectively. Also, it could not stop the United States from involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and has equally had little influence on the succession of Arab-Israeli wars.

Reforms:

• The United Nations has undergone phases of reform since its foundation in 1945. During the first years, the first decisive change was the development of peacekeeping measures to oversee the implementation of ceasefire agreements in 1949 in the Middle East and one year later in the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan.
• With states from Africa and Asia joining the United Nations, development issues became increasingly important, resulting in the expansion of the United Nations in the development area, including the establishment of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1965 and negotiations on an International Economic Order (NIEO) as part of the North-South conflict in the 1970s.
• The World Summit in 2005 recognized, albeit mainly symbolically, an international 'responsibility to protect' populations from genocide and the Human Rights Council replaced the discredited Commission on Human Rights.

Need for reforms:

• United Nations Security Council reform: A very frequently discussed change to the UN structure is to change the permanent membership of the UN Security Council, which reflects the power structure of the world as it was in 1945. There are several proposed plans, notably by the G4 nations, by the Uniting for Consensus group, and by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
• The UNSC’s permanent, veto-carrying members, chosen by virtue of being “winners” of World War II — the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and later China — can hardly claim adequate representation of the world’s leadership today. The UNSC does not include a permanent member from the African, Australian and South American continents, and the pillars of the multilateral order, such as the G-4 group of Brazil, India, Germany and Japan, have been ignored for long
• The UN must stop promoting on the basis of political correctness that encourages promoting staffs proportionately from certain regions of the world, but instead make more use of Asia, Africa and other so-called less developed regions that now offer a large pool of talented, skilled, and highly motivated professionals. These individuals who are highly qualified will readily move up through the UN system without need of the "cultural relativism which is used to promote incompetents."
• General Assembly Reforms: The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) can only make non-binding recommendations, which is another reason for its 
• Financing of the UN is central to UN reform. The UN cannot perform effectively as long as its budget remains tightly constrained.   For all the talk about auditors and oversight bodies, the UN mainly needs cash.  Financial reforms must consider new ways to raise funds, including "alternative financing" such as Global Taxes.
• Human rights reform: The United Nations Commission on Human Rights came under fire during its existence for the high-profile positions it gave to member states that did not guarantee the human rights of their own citizens.
• UN Secretariat Transparency reform: At another level, calls for reforming the UN demand to make the UN administration (usually called the UN Secretariat or "the bureaucracy") more transparent, more accountable, and more efficient, including direct election of the Secretary-General by the people as in a presidential system
• For India, what has been most frustrating is that despite the dysfunctional power balance that prevails, the UN’s reform process, held through Inter Governmental Negotiations (IGN) has not made progress over decades, despite commitments. The UN has chosen to “rollover” the discussions of the IGN, which are looking at five major issues: enlarging the Security Council, categories of membership, the question of the veto that five Permanent members of the UNSC wield regional representation, and redistributing the Security Council-General Assembly power balance.

Conclusion

• By becoming the world's mightiest structure for peace and development, the organization has remained true to its founding mission despite the challenges, and has made incredible advancement in maintaining global peace and security, promoting social progress and better standards of life, strengthening international law and upholding human rights.
• The U.N must focus on real action. It should aim at problem solving as it advances, security, development and human rights in parallel. The issue of development should be highlighted in the global macro framework.