“We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” begins the preamble to the U.N. Charter. It goes on “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”
As the foundational document for the United Nations, which now underpins diplomacy between the U.N.’s 193 member states, the charter’s explicit purposes include “collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace,” the development of “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples,” and the promotion and encouragement of respect “for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion.”
These are noble and essential goals for human survival and quality of life. Without such lode stars, we would be hopelessly lost as a species. Yet, even with them, we are tottering through the mid-2020s with a brutal war in the heart of Europe, metastasizing coups in the Sahel region of Africa, the ongoing annihilation of Gaza, the potential demise of freedom of navigation, a bloodied Caucasus, the transformation of our minds into a disinformation battlefield and a West Pacific in danger of becoming the personal fiefdom of a man who has been permitted to become one of the most powerful dictators in history. Nuclear arms are proliferating. Outer space, the supposed province of all humankind, is joining cyberspace as the latest conflict frontier. And humanity may once again be confronting the kinds of crimes it promised never again to inflict upon itself.
It is valid to suppose that matters could be very much worse if the United Nations did not exist. However, it is equally valid to presume that they could also be very much better if the institution did not give equal weight to the votes and opinions of autocrats who have stolen the voices of their peoples as it does to those who are genuine, if imperfect, representatives of their citizens. For the U.N. of today is the place where every dictator gets a vote as if they hadn’t trampled down everybody else in their country to achieve it.
At the heart of the issue is a conception of equality between states that has no precondition for democracy and the lack of practical distinction made between those whose governance and legal architecture looks to uphold the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights in comparison to those who have no intention to accord with it. Eritrea, which commits alleged ethnic cleansing under a president in his third decade of rule and currently holds the record for the longest detention of a journalist on the planet, wields more or less the same level of influence over global human rights protections as Finland, where even broadband internet is a legal right.
Nowhere is the incongruity quite so conspicuous as with China. From Tehran to Pyongyang, many of the earlier mentioned Doomsday precursors trace back to a coterie of captured states whose clubby malevolence proceeds through the nexus of Beijing. The Putins, Khameneis and Kims of this world would find it much tougher to wreak their geopolitical havoc without the exchange of weapons components, knowhow, fuel, equipment and money that the Chinese Communist Party oversees. Its strongly suspected predilection for crimes against humanity is meanwhile common knowledge, including at the United Nations itself.
However, because the U.N. legitimizes dictatorships and democracies alike, the situation stands to worsen. The institution has platformed China President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative as delivering “hope to the world” even though there is evidence that the global infrastructure drive is rife with environmental and human rights abuses, serves to quieten international criticism of Xi’s mistreatment of his own people and exports his model of extreme societal control to the developing world. The U.N. Industrial Development Organization is meanwhile working together with China’s Huawei to establish the Global Alliance on Artificial Intelligence for Industry and Manufacturing, an ominous partnership for anybody who fears the confluence between advanced technology and totalitarianism.
Moreover, by applying the principle of equality between states irrespective of their democratic condition or adherence to the Declaration of Human Rights, the U.N. has created forums that threaten its own raison d’etre. This was manifest at last month’s routine Human Rights Council review of China, at which its fellow tyrannies like Belarus and South Sudan were able to both bootlick Beijing and piggyback on the procedure to subtly push for a revision of rights definitions that would undoubtedly gut protections for basic freedoms.
Under the circumstances, it is little wonder that the U.N. has normalized the practice of confirming the names of human rights defenders to the very regimes that put them at risk and stands accused of targeting whistleblowers who reveal such wrongdoing, or that recent allegations are deemed credible linking employees at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA) to 2023’s terrorist massacre by Hamas. Considering the influence that humankind’s most depraved and dangerous individuals are allowed to cast over the organization, it would almost be surprising if such scandals were not periodically breaking.
Depressingly, detaching the grip of malevolent actors will be no simple matter. As mentioned, several of the international community’s gravest rights abusers are jostling for a reform process, not to propel the United Nations towards achieving its foundational goals, but to completely undermine them. This makes any attempt to resolve structural issues inherently treacherous.
Nonetheless, it was only back in 1999 that then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Anan described modern sovereignty in terms of states being “at the service of their peoples, and not vice versa” in a global community where the personal sovereignty of everyone was enhanced and understood as “the fundamental freedom of each individual.” It is high time that governance models that facilitate such conditions are given precedence and greater proportional authority in international institutions, especially in the sphere of human rights, in order to incentivize others to achieve the same.
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