The United Nations has reached its 75th year of service and as the world celebrates this milestone, we might consider changing some of the problematic areas that have kept the UN from bringing more peace and stability to the world. As I watched the responses to its 75th year of service on September 21, I felt the need to pen these words.
A Little Background on the UN
There are six primary parts of the UN.
- The General Assembly that all 193 current member states participate in.
- The Security Council (UNSC) that is highly limited in membership to just 15 nations and exists to maintain the peace globally.
- The Economic and Social Council is a 54-member body that focuses on economic, social, and environmental issues.
- The International Court of Justice is the judicial body of the UN, tasked with settling legal disputes submitted by member states and giving advisory opinions to UN entities.
- The Secretariat includes the tens of thousands of UN staff members that carry out the daily mission of the UN.
- The 6th body of the UN is the Trusteeship Council that suspended its own operations in 1994.
Four Changes That Will Make the UN Relevant
While all of the components are important, the General Assembly, Security Council, and the Secretariat are the focus here.
1. Updating the UNSC
The UN should enlarge the core of the UNSC and remove the veto power of individual nations. Currently, China, France, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, and the United Sates are veto-holding permanent members of the council. They are able to hold back human rights abuse investigations into themselves, among other things. As China is allegedly illegally imprisoning 1-2 million Muslims in camps, this veto-power allows one nation to protect itself or another nation from investigation and creates an international crisis. Imagine Hitler’s Germany with such a position in 1939.
Short of removing consistently bad actors like Russia and China from the Security Council, we can rectify this oversight by adding four more nations to the permanent membership and removing the special voting power known as the “right to veto.” Adding nations that can balance the powers already on the council and that represent various geographical, social, environmental, and religious viewpoints is key. Australia, Canada, India, and Oman come to mind as viable candidates.
As the main tools of the UNSC to bring conflict to an end are issuing ceasefire directives and sending military observers and peacekeepers into war zones, it would be wise to add nations to the permanent security council that are experienced in these activities. The remaining rotating body of security council nations that make up the 15 members should never include states under human rights abuse investigations or are sponsors of terrorism.
2. Reimagining the UN Mission/Funding and Removing Corruption
The UN approved a 1-year budget 2020 for the UN at just over $3 billion. There is also a separate budget for peacekeeping missions which was around $6.5 billion for 2019-20. The top contributors (by share of percentage of the UN budget) for 2019–2021 are the United States (22%), China (12%), Japan (8.5%), Germany (6%), United Kingdom (4.5%), France (4.4%), and Italy (3.3%). Just 25 nations make up around 88% of the funding contributions to the UN.
This is a good time for the most financially crucial nations of the organization to assess the UN missions and how funds are being used to meet them. Finally, it is past time for those members paying the most into the system to set up an external watchdog agency to find and remove corruption.
The seventeen 2015 goals seem admirable, but could use a reality check to see if they are feasible. More importantly, they need to be assessed to see if any plans to achieve the goals are sustainable and effective. While Goal 1. “Ending poverty everywhere” sounds nice, it is highly likely that a group of nations as loosely organized and often at odds as the UN can achieve that. Or maybe that should be the only goal for the UN and all efforts should support it. The same scrutiny should be given to the UN goals of ending hunger, ensuring healthy lives, ensuring quality education, making modern energy affordable, and making cities inclusive.
One method would be to create a committee from the donor nations that give more than 2% of the UN budget to evaluate all the goals with a sharp dose of reality. Next, this committee should relook at more equitable power sharing mechanism for those who give the most and those who take the most from the UN. Nations that cannot solve their own internal economic issues likely have less to add to the global solutions aimed at solving it in other nations. Nations struggling to survive do have ideas and lessons to give, but that does not mean they need leadership positions to do so.
Finally, the largest donor nation committee needs a body of anti-corruption investigators outside the control of the Secretariat to find and remove corrupt UN staff at every level. If you have ever seen the UN operate in war zones, you know that fraud and waste are regular problems that the UN team leaders face. You likely also saw how powerless the UN was to root out corrupt members. This external agency could become a valuable tool for UN missions globally to bring about positive changes that can improve the effectiveness of their missions in each country. This also ensures that corruption issues that rise to the highest levels of the UN are properly investigated and that no one escapes justice. This anti-corruption watchdog should report directly to the major donor committee and have the ability to arrest and prosecute any UN employee or contractor.
3. Move all UN buildings and Retain the Best Staff
While it may not seem to make fiscal sense to build new infrastructure and move all the UN and UN related entities, it can do more good than harm in reality. Today, much of the UN infrastructure is located in NYC, The Netherlands, Washington DC, Geneva, Vienna, and Rome. As a wise friend once suggested to me, if you want to improve security and the economy, then build UN headquarters in the regions that need the most help.
The benefits for co-locating the UN buildings and staff around the globe in nations in need of stability, security, and economic progress are pretty obvious. The construction effort alone would create an economic, security, and education boom wherever they are located, if local labor and expertise is used.
A few ideas might include moving the UN Headquarters with all its NYC based entities near Kabul, Afghanistan, moving the World Bank and IMF to Venezuela, relocating the International Criminal Court to Yemen or Rwanda, situating the World Food Program in the Central African Republic, UNICEF in Syria, or the WHO in Pakistan.
This simple action would create a decade of security, education, and economic improvement in the nations and regions that will gain these entities. It also has the secondary effect of ensuring only the best humanitarians apply to work at the UN. Current locations can lead to applications from people that want to move to a nice location to work. This will not be a major hurdle for recruitment and retention as many of the best UN workers can already be found out at the edges of civilization battling insecurity, poverty, and corruption in challenging locations.
4. Address Human Rights Violations Head-on
The UN has amongst its membership serial and massive human rights abusers. These members ruin the image of all other members that find this behavior immoral and unethical. Now is the time to address this open wound.
Create a human rights violation system that places nations accused of massive human rights abuses into a probationary status and removes them from leadership positions and seats on councils and committees. Actions like Russia has taken in attempting to steal Crimea from Ukraine, or like China allegedly imprisoning millions of citizens based on their religion must not be ignored.
When these glaring actions are taken by permanent members of the security council, it causes all members and citizens around the globe to question the UN’s relevancy and commitment to human rights. As an organization dependent on donations for its sustainment, the UN must correct this glaring omission to remain valuable to humanity in the next 75 years.
The next Generation Needs More from the UN
The alternative to making the UN a more relevant and accountable international government organization is to create a UN_2.0 that only allows membership for democracies that don’t constantly violate the human rights of their citizens. Without major changes like these, a broom may be closer to sweeping the UN into the past than many think. The younger generations especially demand more attention to human rights and equality, and they have an entrepreneurial spirit that will lead them to find a better way to achieve it. While some may be comfortable with the current UN, most generations are not and need to see change.
