UN 60th General Assembly: Lost Summit?
Mary Robinson; the former Irish President and the former Human Rights Commissioner of the UN says on article on the International Herald Tribune:
There was a vacuum here at the United Nations summit this month, an aching space demanding to be filled. What was lacking, quite simply, was leadership: the vision that could have put backbone into long overdue reform and new purpose into the multilateral drive to tackle poverty. We didn’t get it. And the disappointment felt by civil society across the world is palpable. Instead of opening a new chapter for the UN, we got a summit of fudge: the self-important restatement of goals already agreed and some shameful backsliding on old promises. As the leaders headed home, the world’s desperate poor were left largely where they had been at the beginning of the week.
Well, as I argued before, the UN lost its relevance long ago!
Click here to view the full article.
October 18th, 2005 at 4:34 pm
One of the positive outcomes from the United Nations Summit in September 2005 was an agreement on Responsibility to Protect (R2P), which commits the UN to taking action to protect people from such crimes as ethnic cleansing and genocide.The Summit resolved that ‘Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This responsibility entails the prevention of such crimes… we are prepared to take collective action, should peaceful means be inadequate… (’para. 138 of the Draft Statement’). There is a reference ot the Chapter VII which allows the UN to take military action.
This establishes the principle that governments have a duty to protect their citizens’ lives and rights, and if they fail to do so, or indeed if it is a government that is actually committing those crimes, it loses its legitimacy and that the community of nations will take on that protection role even if it means infringing the sovereignty of the state.
This is an important and historic step, a change to the doctrine of sovereignty that can be traced back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. No-one who cares about humanity can mourn the demise of the idea that regimes can do exactly as they please with those who lie in their power, but on the other hand, both the political environment and the way in which R2P will be worked out needs close inspection and development. It could be abused, giving legitimacy ot more Iraq-style adventures…or it could lead to a new era of enhanced justice and boosted human rights practices. It depends on how we, the people, wish for things to develop… (more on http://www.greenhealth.org.uk/Index%20of%20Governance.htm )
October 25th, 2005 at 1:21 pm
I think we the people are discussed above by that beautiful phrase…but is it really our interest that the UN is looking after? What I have never understood is why there is so much aid once a man-made calamity has occurred and a people have been dispersed? Why doesn’t the UN act and stop these atrocities before they happen? The UN watched as Darfur erupted…then once there are enough refugees in Chad the “humunitarians” swam in….delivering all these goodies. There is nothing painful in this world than losing one’s “home” (dual meaning intended here) ask the Katrina victims. The people are the victims here, for humanity’s sake help them while they are still at their natural environment (home).