| by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne
(February 13, 2013, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, at a press briefing on 22 January 2013 in New York, stressed that his approach to the role and functions of the United Nations was preventive diplomacy, which he placed second in priority to sustainable development. The Secretary General, in his prioritizing of sustainable development obviously meant the classic definition adopted by the United Nations (first introduced by a Report called “Our Common Future”, also known as the Brundtland Report, published by the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable development contains within it two key concepts: the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.
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One has to place both the UN and the global community of nations in perspective. The history of mankind has proved that it is part of human nature to learn from past experience. That having been said, we have also acted with foresight in situations where we could not build on past experience.
The United Nations has its Millennium Goals, which should be reached by 2015. These goals address the world’s needs, starting with the need for the alleviation of poverty. Curiously, the Secretary General, in his address prior to the press briefing, said that he was on his way to Kuwait to seek pledges of donor nations that would provide much needed funds for the next 6 months to provide for the refugees of Syria, the need being $ 1.5 billion. Lakhdar Brahimi, Joint Special Representative of the United Nations and the League of Arab States to Syria, in an interview on 30 January 2013 stated that Syria – a country in which no one went hungry prior to the current conflict - now has 25% of its people in dire need.
Quite simplistically, one could say that the sum involved would be “peanuts” for the financial giants of the world. So what is keeping the powerful and wealthy nations of the world from assisting the United Nations in its quest?
According to the World Bank, extreme poverty is the condition in which a person lives on less than US$ 1 per day, and moderate poverty is when he is forced to exist on less than $2 a day. The proportion of the developing world’s population living in extreme economic poverty fell from 28 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2001. Much of the improvement s occurred in East and South Asia. In Sub-Saharan Africa GDP/capita shrank with 14 percent and extreme poverty increased from 41 percent in 1981 to 46 percent in 2001. Other regions saw little or no change. In the early 1990s the transition economies of Europe and Central Asia experienced a sharp drop in income. Poverty rates rose to 6 percent at the end of the decade before beginning to recede.
It is reported that more than 80 percent of the global population lives in countries with wide differentials of income which are rapidly widening. Only 5 per cent of the global income is earned by a massive 40 percent of the world population and 75 percent of the global income is earned by just 20 percent of the entire population of the world. UNICEF has recorded that 22,000 children die every day due to poverty. The same Report says that less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it has not happened yet.
United Nations statistics reveal that one third of deaths in the world - some 18 million people a year or 50,000 per day - are due to poverty-related causes. That would be 270 million people since 1990, the majority women and children, roughly equal to the population of the United States. Every year nearly 11 million children die before their fifth birthday. In 2001, 1.1 billion people had consumption levels below $1 a day and 2.7 billion lived on less than $2 a day. 800 million people go to bed hungry every day.
The following figures are also relevant: Half the world's 3,000,000,000 people live on less than $2.00 a day. Over one billion people heralded the 21st century totally illiterate; The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (of the world's countries) is less than the combined wealth of the world's 3 richest people. Nearly 1,000,000,000 people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.; and 51% of the world's 100 wealthiest bodies are corporations. The wealthiest nation on Earth has the widest gap between rich and poor of any industrialized nation; The poorer the country, the more likely that its debt repayments are being taken from people who neither contracted the loans nor received any of the money; 20% of the population in developed nations consume 86% of the world's goods; The top 20% of people living in the richest countries enjoy 82% of export trade and 68% of foreign direct investment. The bottom 20% of people barely receive more than 1%; and in 1960, the 20% of people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20%. In 1997, that ratio increased to 74 times as much.
Jeffrey Sachs, onetime Special Advisor to former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on the UN Millennium Development Goals and Economic Advisor to Governments around the World, in his book, The End of Poverty – Economic Possibilities of Our Time (Penguin: New York, 2005) states without reservation that by 2025, we could be totally poverty-free by using the wealth of the world and the power of unending repositories of knowledge that we have. Of course, as every good news has a caveat, Sachs lays down the condition that our ability to transcend global poverty would depend on our collective wisdom in using our resources prudently and with good judgment. In his book, Sachs shows the way towards charting a wiser path towards global wealth and prosperity.
It is quite obvious that, from now until 2015 the United Nations has a daunting task. In the central theme of the Millennium Goals lies the belief of States that the fundamental challenge to be faced today is to ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people. For while globalization offers great opportunities, at present its benefits are very unevenly shared, while its costs are unevenly distributed. There is overall recognition that developing countries and countries with economies in transition face special difficulties in responding to this central challenge. Thus, only through broad and sustained efforts to create a shared future, based upon common humanity in all its diversity, can globalization be made fully inclusive and equitable. States are resolved that these efforts must include policies and measures, at the global level, which correspond to the needs of developing countries and economies in transition and are formulated and implemented with their effective participation.
States have also recognized, through the Millennium Goals certain fundamental values to be essential to international relations in the twenty-first century. These include freedom, equality, solidarity, tolerance, respect for nature, shared responsibility, and peace and security. One of the results of the Millennium Goals was an “Outcome Document” adopted by global leaders at a High Level Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2005. This document calls for a high level coordination between the various UN specialized agencies, resulting in a stronger system-wide coherence, particularly across the various development related agencies, funds and programs of the United Nations. Secretary General Kofi Annan has commissioned a group of international experts to take the Outcome Document forward in ensuring stronger coordination in humanitarian assistance, environmental activities and development.
With all these, the United Nations also has to balance what the Secretary General called “preventive diplomacy”. He said the United Nations should not be considered a “global fire station” that would douse fires whenever they flamed across the world. Instead the Organization should prevent catastrophes and conflicts and prevent the world from plunging into want and suffering.
One has to place both the UN and the global community of nations in perspective. The history of mankind has proved that it is part of human nature to learn from past experience. That having been said, we have also acted with foresight in situations where we could not build on past experience. When we look at the history of international relations, we see that we have acted with foresight, as a result of which we have brought about major changes to the international legal system by reacting to past disasters. The United Nations was built on the failure of the League of Nations which was set up as a reaction to World War 1. The failure of the League of Nations was that its Covenant, although intended to prevent the recurrence of atrocities of 1914, failed to outlaw war but merely provided procedures for the peaceful settlement of disputes. Creators of the United Nations learnt from this mistake and wrote into the Charter of the UN the principle of collective security. The UN Security Council, on behalf of the entirety of UN member States, was empowered by the Charter to take decisive action against delinquents. However, this has never worked in practice when it was most needed. For example, the Security Council was literally impotent during the height of the Cold War. The Security Council has not taken or enforced military action against delinquent States nor has it received military assistance from member States to implement the powers ascribed to the Security Council by the UN Charter. The reactions of the Security Council have allegedly been sporadic and reactive, authorizing member States to take action on its behalf, which has prompted one commentator to say that the Council has not acted or functioned as a constitutional framework for a peaceful world but rather as a fire department reacting to emergencies as they rise.
The above notwithstanding, to totally lay the blame at the doorstep of the United Nations for its inability to take action when required is analogous to blaming a medical doctor for the death of a patient who does not heed the doctor’s advice. The prime offender in the current situation of the UN is international law or those who adopt international law, which are the member States of the United Nations. As many are aware, one of the sources of public international law is the multilateral treaty through which States create law to be adhered to by the community of nations. Blatant examples of the reluctance of States to adopt international legislation in a timely fashion can be seen firstly with regard to the events of 11 September 2001, where, although there were repeated warnings by the Security Council prior to the events of the danger of a terrorist attack, and the Council called upon States to take effective action, particularly to ratify and implement existing security treaties, no action was taken. Another area of significant concern is the threat of nuclear weapons, which has been looming over several decades. Although the enormity of damage caused by nuclear devastation was apparent after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, States have addressed this issue with inexplicable complacence and insouciance. There is no existing treaty which outlaws or bans the use of nuclear weapons outright. The closest is the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) which bans all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes. It was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 September 1996 but had not entered into force as of December 2012. The Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty merely preserves the oligopoly of nuclear powers as they exist at the present time. Article VI of the Treaty, which obliges States to negotiate with a view to achieving complete disarmament, remains a toothless tiger. Even the International Court of Justice, when requested for an opinion in July 1996 as to whether nuclear weapons and their use are against accepted principles of public international law, meandered to explain that there was no comprehensive and universal prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons, either in customary or conventional internal law.
Therefore, the question that arises is “when international law remains retrogressive in this manner, could one expect the United Nations to progress?” The root cause of the regress lies in the legislators or States themselves, who have not acted with foresight in the face of emergent threats and problems. Certainly, this somewhat bizarre collective disability is not characteristic of humanity, which has been quick to foresee the future. The unique nature of the international community, which is increasingly showing a tendency to ignore the experiences of others and the complexities of the modern world in finding a compromise to new and emergent issues, could well be the reason.
 United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, at a...){kind=link}