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UN
Under-Secretary-General Shashi
Tharoor on reforming the United
Nations
By Glen
Covert
May
2006
On March 15, before
a World Affairs Council audience
at the Langston Hughes Performing
Arts Center, UN
Under-Secretary-General Shashi
Tharoor spoke about the challenges
and possibilities of reforming the
United Nations. Earlier in the
day, he had addressed that same
issue at a sold-out WAC luncheon
at the Rainier Club. And
incidentally, both audiences
experienced reform history unfold
before their eyes; in the few
hours between his luncheon
address, in which he mentioned the
hopeful possibility of a new UN
Human Rights Council, and his
speech, an historic reform
resolution creating that very
Council was passed by the UN
General Assembly.
A major milestone
for the nearly sixty-year old
United Nations, the Human Rights
Council can be considered a symbol
of the, as Tharoor described it,
“highly adaptable (UN) that has
evolved in response to changing
times.” Being “smaller and more
focused” than the “cumbersome and
hugely politicized” Human Rights
Commission, the Council should be
more effective in ensuring human
rights standards are maintained
worldwide. Should it be, it would
be the sought-after solution for
one of the many “problems without
passports,” which Tharoor
explained is the UN’s term for
“problems that cross all frontiers
uninvited … whose solutions no one
country or one group of countries,
however powerful, can fight on
their own.”
Does the Human
Rights Council really prove the
“adaptability” of the UN? Well,
Mr. Tharoor, a UN official since
1978, describes himself as being
“conscious of how much the United
Nations has in fact already
changed since [he] joined the
organization.” His career
experiences include being Head of
the UN High Commission for
Refugees in Singapore (1981-1984)
during the peak of the Vietnamese
"boat people" crisis. Now, as
Under-Secretary-General for
Communication and Public
Information (since 2001), Shashi
Tharoor can be considered an
authority on UN reform and thereby
offered his insight as the first
featured speaker of the “Community
Discussion Series” of the World
Affairs Council’s Community
Programs arm.
The Community
Discussion Series is geared toward
providing the local community with
a forum where global issues that
concern the US can be discussed.
Co-facilitating the post-speech
roundtable discussion was former
WAC intern, European Weekly’s Glen
Covert.
A solution to one
of the world’s many “problems
without passports,” the creation
of the Human Rights Council is
Tharoor’s reassurance to the world
that not only are “we [the UN] not
resting on our loins,” but the UN
is currently engaged in “major
reforms, far from the first,
[that] are perhaps the most far
reaching since the institution’s
founding.” And this, he insists,
means something, considering where
the UN was twenty years ago,
implementation wise i.e. field
activity. He explained
hypothetically, “If I had
suggested to my seniors at that
time [1978] … that the UN I was
joining would one day observe and
even run elections in sovereign
states, that it would conduct
intrusive investigations of
weapons of mass destruction, that
it would impose comprehensive
sanctions on the entire
import-export trade of a
medium-sized member state, or that
it would set up international
criminal tribunals, and coerce
governments into handing over
their citizens to be tried by
foreigners under international law
for crimes against their own
people and their neighbors, I’m
sure my seniors would have told me
that I simply did not understand
what the United Nations was all
about.” Well, as it turns out,
the UN has done each one of those
things plus some in the ensuing
twenty years. In fact, Tharoor
pointed out, today, since the
Nepalese king’s assumption of
absolute power, the UN has a “huge
human rights monitoring mission,
looking into the well being of
normal people.”
The creation of the
Human Rights Council is hardly an
isolated event. It follows the
other “major” and “most far
reaching reforms” that Tharoor
would classify as “the activities
that make the big headlines.” In
this case, they all stem from the
World Summit.
The World Summit,
Tharoor emphasized, was “the
summit of world leaders,” where
“months of intense and rather
difficult negotiations” for
reforming the UN were
“culminated.” The result of “the
largest ever gathering of heads of
state and government in human
history” was the Outcome
Document. Even though,
Tharoor admitted, this document
did fail “to address the
international community stalemate
on disarmament and proliferation
issues, [and] the absence still of
a clear universally agreed
definition of terrorism,” Tharoor
stressed that it did “take some
very important strides in [the]
direction” of “reforming the
international system, of which the
UN is a lynchpin.”
Development of poor
countries was another point of
concern in the Outcome Document.
Tharoor clarified that the
“General Assembly reinforced the
commitment that both rich and
developing states [will] work
together to promote development”
and achieve the Millennium Goal,
fighting poverty, by 2015.
Another development
from the World Summit was a
sweeping agreement to combat
terrorism. Although a legal
definition is still wanting,
Shashi Tharoor defends the
political definition he quoted:
“An unqualified condemnation of
terrorism in all its forms and
manifestations committed by
whomever, where ever, and for
whatever the purpose.” Of equal
importance is the newly created
Peace building Commission
(December 2005), charged with
enforcing “the acceptance for the
first time” by the General
Assembly “of a collective
international responsibility to
protect populations from genocide,
war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and
crimes against humanity.”
Many other reforms
are being proposed. However
Shashi Tharoor did not elaborate
because, half jokingly, “I think
I’ve already taxed your patience
enough this evening and … I
suspect that even the most
committed multilateralist would
not want to hear a detailed
account of the Secretary-General’s
proposed changes to management,
administration, finance, and
budget.”
But, as for
reforming the Security Council,
Mr. Tharoor confessed that the
world is “certainly unlikely to
see the creation of new permanent
seats for the immediately
foreseeable future.” The problem
is the tendency of the members of
the General Assembly to be
self-serving i.e. nationalistic.
For case in point, Tharoor
mentioned the Italian foreign
minister’s response when Germany
and Japan sought seats in the
Security Council: “What’s all this
talk about Germany and Japan? We
lost the war too.” But it is more
likely the “very high threshold”
of consenters needed in the
General Assembly to change the UN
charter, in which the Security
Council is “enshrined,” that will
prevent any sort of reform to the
Council. Basically, “you need
two-thirds of the General Assembly
to vote for a change and then you
need that change to be ratified,
which means by parliaments, of
two-thirds of the members states
including all five permanent
members (China, France, the
Russian Federation, the United
Kingdom, and the United States).
So, to put it bluntly, one
American senator, by pocketing a
charter amendment, can delay a
ratification of such a process for
a very long time indeed.”
But why so much
bureaucracy? Why can’t the UN be
more nimble and quick about
reforming itself? Well, “we are
an organization,” Tharoor kindly
reminded, “of 191 Member States,
and that is something that
shouldn’t be forgotten. … No
company would run with an active
board of directors of 191, each
trying to tell the executives how
to do things. Well, we have to
suffer that on a day-to-day
basis.”
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