Renewed Focus

From a UN outsider's perspective, 2005 could be described in Queen Elizabeth's words, as an "annus horribilis" a horrible year. However in Annan's press conference he demonstrated a renewed focus on several objectives for his last year in office. His top priorities are the ongoing fight against poverty and disease, promoting peace and security, and strengthening the UN. Specifically, he called attention to the ongoing struggle in the Sudan, urging more attention to the Darfur region.

Annan cited two accomplishments: the badly needed Emergency Relief Fund, to speed up response to crises, and the Peace Building Commission, providing a detailed mechanism to prevent countries emerging from conflict from falling back into chaos. The need is great, since 50% of the conflicts in the past 20 years, have recurred within 5 years of following peace agreements.

Budgetary Constraints

Annan stated that progress has unfortunately been stalled by lack of a budget. The budget is usually planned for two years, and traditionally by consensus by all 191 member states. If a single country withholds its support, this throws the entire process into disarray. John Bolton, the U.S's abrasive ambassador has exacerbated already existing tensions between the have and have-not countries by demanding that the UN's biennial budget for 2006-2007 should be shrunk to a three-month budget, pending the UN's response to the US demands for change.

In a recent speech, in his usual bluntly arrogant style of diplomatic finesse, Bolton targeted the group of 132 developing nations, stating that if they didn't cooperate with the U.S. Washington would look elsewhere to resolve world problems. Paradoxically, this is a clear implication that the U.S., though at present the greatest power in the world, still has to recognize limits. International problems of concern to the U.S cannot be resolved alone. The US, like it or not, needs an international forum to deal with these problems.

After the year-end press conference, a last minute deal on the budget was cobbled together, producing a two-year budget limiting first year expenditures by the Secretary General, and a cap for the first half year. (China, and the ambassador from Jamaica, the current chairman for the group of developing countries, criticized the closed door negotiations and protested that by limiting the first half year expenditures, a two year budget has been turned into a six-month budget).

Human Rights Council

The most significant issue under contention is the effort to establish an effective, impartial, and functioning Human Rights Council. This effort is a response to a deplorable situation in which some of the worst offenders on human rights violations have been or are currently members, for example, Sudan and Zimbabwe.

Intense negotiations are continuing on a major restucturing of the Human Rights Commission to be completed, hopefully, by the end of March. Two proposals have been offered for inclusion of members. One is the establishment of criteria for inclusion. The other proposal is a two-thirds vote by the General Assembly, Annan's original proposal.

The first proposal seems to us to create the difficult problem of how, and most particularly who will decide if the criteria are met. Kofi Annan has called attention to the division between developed and developing countries making negotiation very difficult. Many of the poorer countries are fearful of an increase of domination by Western powers as well as dilution of the power of the General Assembly. Obviously, because of the division between the have and have-not countries, the selection of the next Secretary General will be very difficult.

Yet, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the need for global attention to international problems continues to grow. If only for the need to ward off chaos, and because of the self interest of all the nations of the world, we think there is realistic hope for cooperation. Sometimes open and sometimes buried under the rhetoric, cooperation will continue to happen.

Phyllis Ehrenfeld, AEU's National Service Conference to the UN
Sylvain Ehrenfeld. IHEU Representative to the UN.