The UN and its General Assembly Must Be Taken Seriously
Victor Ângelo
The annual high-level session of the UN General Assembly begins next week. The leaders of most of the states that make up the international scene will be in New York. One of the exceptions will be the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The American administration has not granted him or his delegation an entry visa. It can refuse to grant a visa, and has done so in the past on rare occasions, despite the Headquarters Agreement signed by Washington in 1947. This agreement stipulates the general, but not absolute, obligation to grant visas to representatives of states intending to participate in UN meetings, especially in the case of the General Assembly.
As always, the US justified the decision by invoking national security and foreign policy reasons. The real motives are clear. First, it is about showing the total alignment of American leadership with the government of Israel. Second, it is to express displeasure with the initiative by Emmanuel Macron and other leaders to bring to the General Assembly the proposal for the recognition of Palestine as a full UN member state. And finally, it is to punish the Palestinians for having filed several complaints against Israel in the international courts based in The Hague.
In any case, the Assembly will vote on Palestine, as proposed by France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and other members. The UN currently has 147 countries that recognize Palestine as a state. This number is expected to increase significantly after the vote. Israel will be diplomatically more isolated if it is confirmed that its policy on Palestine is not accepted by almost all states, with the exception of the U.S. and a few others.
The vote will have a symbolic, non-binding political value. No state can become a full member of the United Nations with only the favorable vote of the General Assembly. It inevitably needs the support of the Security Council, with no veto from the five permanent members. In this case, it is evident that the U.S. will exercise its veto. Trump will ignore the will of the community of nations. And he will remind us that the right to veto is a historical aberration that needs to be reviewed, or at a minimum, deeply restricted given the new balance of power in the international framework.
Trump's speech on the morning of the first day (23/09) is awaited with enormous apprehension. It begins with an originality: for the first time, an American president speaks at the podium without the process of appointing a permanent U.S. representative having been completed. In May, the White House announced that Mike Waltz would be the representative of the Trump Administration to the UN, after having played the very important role of National Security Advisor and then being dismissed a few weeks later. His confirmation is still dragging on in the Senate corridors. The U.S. is represented in New York by a team of interims, who receive few or no directives from Washington. Trump does not have the UN on his list of priorities, except when it comes to leaving certain organizations or cutting or eliminating the financial contributions he is obligated to pay to the UN system.
He will certainly insist on a UN fundamentally focused on peace and international security, words spoken for reasons of mere personal image. Trump dreams of being seen as the mediator par excellence of conflicts, the champion of peace, worthy of the Nobel Prize. He does not believe in the UN's capacity in this matter. In reality, I believe he places no value on the United Nations. It is just a podium that allows him to display his oversized ego. But he does not want an active UN in any of the system's three pillars: international stability, development, and human rights.
The responsibility for stability, which should stem from respect for the UN Charter and international law, falls to the Americans, according to his way of thinking. Development, social progress, and environmental issues are matters for the Europeans. He forgets, however, that in these areas, the ones gaining ground are the Chinese, who are deeply committed to an alternative political and economic order, in a broad alliance with the so-called Global South. As for human rights, the issue will be left to the domain of the use of force and to the interpretations that each state will make of the dignity and life of its citizens. For the Chinese and their allies, human rights are a matter of national sovereignty that should not be included in the multilateral agenda.
All of this signifies the marginalization of the UN's political and human dimensions. Next week will allow us to better understand what the future of the UN may be.
Meanwhile, António Guterres launched what he called an exercise in system reform in May. He named it UN80 and said it would have three objectives: reduce expenses; eliminate mandates that no longer make sense; and carry out an institutional transformation. It was an ambitious plan that could only be successful if it had the support of the major countries and was carried out in dialogue with the organization's staff. None of that happened. In reality, the priority should have been to go door-to-door and beg the delinquent states, such as the U.S. and China, to honor their financial commitments. UN reform begins with holding each member state accountable.
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