UN Reform: Where Are We Now?

Andrea Cofelice
Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies on Federalism, Torino, Italy

With the publication of An Agenda for Peace (1992), An Agenda for Development (1994) and An Agenda for Democratisation (1996), the then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali launched an ambitious program to reform the United Nations, in order to strengthen, democratise and adapt the Organisation’s structure and working methods to the changed international context, marked by the end of the Cold War.

What remains nowadays of that “reform afflatus”? What are the initiatives undertaken and the unresolved issues?

At institutional level, the few initiatives implemented so far date back to the Secretariat of Kofi Annan (1997-2006), who chose to focus his agenda on the reform of the peace and human rights pillar, by encouraging the creation of the Peace-building Commission and the Human Rights Council (both proposals were contained in his 2005 report In Larger Freedom).

The Peace-building Commission was established in 2006 to satisfy actual needs “on the ground”. Traditional UN peace-keeping missions, indeed, generally ended with the signing of peace agreements among the parties. However, empirical evidence has shown that about half of the countries involved in conflicts, especially in civil conflicts, tend to fall again into the spiral of violence within five years since the signing of these agreements.

To reduce this risk, the Peace-building Commission, a 31-member intergovernmental body, operates in post-conflict contexts with a view to mobilising the necessary resources and promoting integrated medium/long-term strategies for the reconstruction of infrastructures, institutions and social networks. The Commission currently works in six African countries: Burundi, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and the Central African Republic.

Also in 2006, the Human Rights Council was established, replacing the former Human Rights Commission. Despite the Commission’s essential function as a hub for the consolidation of the international human rights law, in the last years of its existence it had become the object of serious criticism for its excessive politicisation and the lack of effective responses to human rights violations in the world.

Without changing its mandate, the current Human Rights Council, a subsidiary body of the General Assembly made up of 47 member states, has set up new and, at least in intentions, more equitable protection mechanisms. In 2021, the UN General Assembly will assess if the Council has managed to meet these expectations.

After the Ban Ki-moon mandate (2007-2016), marked by a disappointing stasis on these issues, reform efforts have been relaunched by the current Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Few months after his election, Guterres presented, in a series of detailed reports, his proposals to strengthen the UN development system (Repositioning the United Nations development system to deliver on the 2030 Agenda: ensuring a better future for all, doc. A/72/124–E/2018/3); reform the peace and security pillar, by creating, within the UN Secretariat, a Department for Political and Peace-Building Affairs and a Department for Peace Operations (Restructuring of the United Nations peace and security pillar, doc. A/72/525); and simplify the Organization management (Shifting the management paradigm in the United Nations: ensuring a better future for all, doc. A/72/492).

The reform proposal of the development pillar is articulated in seven strategic points addressing the fragmentation and bureaucratization of the UN system, that cause serious operational shortcomings, duplication of work and dispersion of resources. Through the adoption of a needs-and-prevention-based approach, the reform proposal also aims to create a more responsible and effective system that could offer better results on the ground and strengthen the responsiveness, planning and risk management capabilities of developing countries.

As far as the peace and security pillar is concerned, Guterres proposes the creation, within the UN Secretariat, of a Department for Political and Peace-Building Affairs and a Department for Peace Operations, in order to improve the effectiveness and coherence of peacekeeping operations and special political missions. The proposal aims to adopt a holistic approach addressing the fundamental causes of conflict and post-conflict situations, placing greater emphasis on their socio-economic aspects as well as on the need to integrate, in a more incisive way, the security, human rights and development pillars. These proposals will be negotiated by the General Assembly in 2018.

It cannot be denied that these past and current efforts to advance the cause of the UN reform are necessary and relevant; however, the elephant in the room is undoubtedly represented by the (failed) reform of Charter-based bodies, especially the Security Council. Although several intergovernmental working groups have been discussing how to reform the UN Security Council since 1993, the current debate is so polarized that member States have not even managed to prepare a draft text for negotiations. What are the main hurdles in this context?

According to an agenda of work set in 2008, the current intergovernmental negotiations on the reform of the Security Council should focus on five items: 1) categories of Council members (permanent, non-permanent or other options); 2) issue of veto; 3) regional representation; 4) size of an enlarged Council and working methods; 5) relations between the Security Council and the General Assembly.

Actually, discussions on items 3 and 4 led to a stalemate situation, due to a sharp confrontation between three main groups of states: the so-called “Group of four - G4”, made up of Germany, Japan, India and Brazil, that sponsor their permanent membership to the Security Council; the African Group, which calls for two additional permanent seats to be reserved for African states; and the grouping “United for consensus” (more heterogeneous but composed, among others, of the main regional “rivals” of the G4 states, including Pakistan, Spain, Italy, Argentina, Canada, Mexico and Colombia), that opposes the expansion of permanent seats and veto power, merely requiring new non-permanent or semi-permanent seats.

Accordingly, it is not surprising that, to date, the most advanced reform proposals coming from civil society, such as the transformation of the Security Council into the Chamber of Regional Organizations, the creation of a UN Parliamentary Assembly, or the democratic reform of global economic and financial institutions (namely World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization), have not (yet) entered the agenda of intergovernmental negotiations. Most of these proposals are contained in the report “Confronting the Crisis of Global Governance”, launched in 2015 by the Commission on Global Security, Justice & Governance, that develops new frameworks for collective action in response to threats to global security and justice.

However, the activism demonstrated so far by the current Secretary General offers some hope for the goal of reforming the UN to be resumed and re-launched in actual terms. After all, a clear awareness remains: although the UN political and bureaucratic structure is elephantine and anachronistic, and the current world governmental leaderships do not stand-out for their far-reaching planning skills, using Antonio Papisca’s words: “as far as its principles, objectives, and (although uncomplete) architecture as a global arrangement for collective security under a ‘supranational’ authority, the UN Charter preserves its validity from a legal, political, moral and historical point of view”.