How United are the Nations?
The United Nations (UN), like its predecessor, the League of Nations, was born out of the ashes of a world war. With the advent of atomic weapons, a third world war could have been apocalyptic. And so, in a quest to quite literally save the world, the founding countries of the UN strove to create a body where the nations of the world could comfortably assemble and deliberate in order to promote global peace and security. Naturally, the UN co-opted additional functions as time went on, and today, aside from worldwide stability, its purposes include “helping nations work together to improve the lives of poor people, to conquer hunger, disease, and illiteracy, and to encourage respect for each other’s rights and freedoms.” The UN expanded its charge from merely keeping the world safe to improving it. This is an honorable resolution, to be sure, but the UN’s attempts to achieve such noble aspirations are often bizarrely misguided and hypocritical.
It should be noted that the UN has achieved important successes in terms of its primary purpose, global stability. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a UN organization, has made important contributions by regulating and inspecting nuclear arsenals, thus helping prevent a nuclear world war. Yet many other supposedly peacemaking actions of the UN seem decidedly wrongheaded.
The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) should have been the apotheosis of the UN’s moral agenda: a body committed to seeking out and stamping out violations of human rights, as expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. One would think that this band of moral crusaders would have been committed to the highest ideals of the sanctity of human life, dignity, and equality before the law; but the ugliness of some of its members, such as notorious human rights abusers like China and Sudan, marred the hopeful visage of this virtuous commission. Libya, under the brutal dictatorship of Moammar Gadafi, was even selected to chair the commission. The presence of such nations on the commission flabbergasted most logical observers. A commission dedicated to protecting human rights placed some of its most well-known dissidents among its leaders. Instead of prosecuting human rights violations, these infamous commission members often used their privileged positions to deflect attention from their countries and continued their human rights violations free from scrutiny.
The commission was abolished in 2006 and a new body, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which operated by a new member voting procedure, replaced the hypocritical UNCHR. Finally, true defenders of human rights would be placed on the council to safeguard our inalienable rights. Well, that was the idea. In practice, the HRC has been just as unsuccessful as the CHR at preventing human rights abusers from joining its ranks. Past, current, and future members of the HRC include China (yes, again), Qatar, and pre-revolution Egypt, the last of which was described by Amnesty International as a “torture centre” at the time. In an ineffective move, the UN went through what was undoubtedly months of bureaucratic red tape and spent mounds of cash in order to replace an old body with a new one that doesn’t differ in any significant way.
Even in the area of global stability, its raison d’etre, the UN has offered baffling solutions to serious problems. The nuclear disarmament committee, established to tackle one of the primary goals of the UN’s charter, has seen singularly unqualified candidates appointed. Iraq was selected to chair the prestigious annual Conference on Disarmament in 2003, a time when it was suspected of having WMDs and was refusing to cooperate with nuclear inspectors. Just recently, Iran, currently under sanctions from both the US and the UN Security Council itself for its uncooperative stance on nuclear weapons, was given a senior seat on the UN Nuclear Disarmament Committee.
Much of the controversy over these appointments comes down to philosophical differences. The UN believes that including countries that abuse human rights in international conversations will somehow induce them into a more clement approach, while the prevailing opinion in the United States is that these appointments only serve to insulate these countries from criticism. Yet despite these theoretical disagreements, the UN remains a crucial tool in protecting global stability.
While it may fall short in its secondary goals, it has (so far) achieved its stated purpose: preventing a third world war. While the circle of dictators it places on human rights and nuclear disarmament committees may remain puzzling, no conflict has since ripped apart the globe in quite the way the first two world wars did. Our world is an inherently unstable place, and the UN justifies its existence by making this planet even a tiny bit more stable.