The Hindu : Only member-states can make the U.N. work

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 28, 2003

Opinion

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Only member-states can make the U.N. work

By Sergio Vieira de Mello

The military preponderance of the U.S. and Britain must not lead us to think international stability can be ensured by force. If the international system is to be based on something other than might, states will have to return to the institution they built: the United Nations. That institution is facing a major crisis. We must find ways to resolve it or face harrowing consequences.

The debates over Iraq — before the war and now in its aftermath — have shown the powers of the world unable to speak to each other in a common language. One has seen this most dramatically in global institutions. From the beginning of the U.N., the Security Council has been responsible for security and the Commission on Human Rights has sought to protect human rights. Yet, in the case of Iraq, the Council was and, apparently, is still unable to agree about security and the role of the U.N. Likewise, the Human Rights Commission, approaching the end of its annual six-week session, is proving nearly unable to discuss human rights.

Is there a way to renew, or rediscover, a common language that could take us beyond this impasse? I think there is, provided we can dramatically change the relationship between security and human rights.

The Security Council debate was about weapons of mass destruction — a classic question of security, one all too familiar to the Council since its inception. It was unable (or unwilling) to imagine its mandate extending beyond this narrow basis. Its debate was not about the many other questions of obvious interest to members, like the lack of democracy in Iraq and the regular terrors visited on political opponents, real or imagined, by its Government. The Council found itself unable to talk about a wider subject, which was how to deal with the security dangers posed by a regime that flagrantly violated the human rights of its citizens and, given the tendency brutality has of pushing beyond borders, went on to attack its neighbours.

Perhaps, the Security Council members thought that human rights issues should more properly be discussed in the Commission on Human Rights. But in the current session of the Commission many of the 53 states represented have been arguing that it should not consider Iraq since the Council was already doing so. Some maintained that Iraqi matters were primarily to do with security, not human rights, and so should remain with the Council. Another line of argument held that human rights in Iraq were primarily a matter of the war — given its toll in civilian lives — and not of human rights violations that long preceded the war.

In the weeks before the war began, I spoke with many of the principals involved in the Council debate. It should be obvious, but perhaps deserves mentioning, that none bore ill-will towards the U.N.; none wanted the Security Council to fail in reaching a consensus. What they lacked was a way of talking about the problem — of framing it politically — such that the Council might reach a consensus. The impasse at the Commission on Human Rights is similar, perhaps worse.

Both venues lacked a way to conceptualise security in human rights terms and to recognise that gross violations of human rights are very often at the core of domestic and international insecurity. This is not a new problem.

This is the signal political failure of our era: the failure to understand the security threat posed by gross violations of human rights, and the failure to achieve a practical consensus in acting against such a threat. Surely we can now see, as we contemplate the loss of thousands of lives in Iraq, that the price of our failure is getting higher. It was already tragically high.

We must look to the U.N. member-states, especially those sitting on the Security Council — and above all to China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S. — to grapple with this failure and to overcome it in a way that is based on responsibilities, not rivalries. To criticise the U.N. as such for failing to achieve consensus on Iraq is to miss the point altogether. When the member-states make a mess of their own rules or disrupt their own, collective political architecture, it is wrong to blame the U.N. or its Secretary-General, whose good offices are not put to use often enough. Kofi Annan has tirelessly advocated consensus on these vital issues, but he cannot force consensus. Nor am I in a position to do so with the Commission on Human Rights, whose mandates are carried out by my office but which I do not direct or control. Power rightly rests with the member-states.

The member-states of the U.N. have an opportunity. By their recent actions, they have further revealed some of the shortcomings of the institution they created (as well as highlighting some of its strengths). All states, especially the Security Council members, should take this opportunity to look at their relations squarely and consider the means for reform. At present, Iraq's long-suffering people are bearing the pain, first of war, now of a contested and contentious peace. It has to be apparent that the time has arrived for all states to redefine global security — to put human rights at the centre of this concept. In doing so, all nations must exercise their responsibility in a way commensurate with their strength. Only then will responsible states, rather than the merely strong, be able to bring lasting stability to our world.

(The writer is the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.)

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