UN REFORM BY OTHER MEANS
by Alexa Van Sickle, YPN member and freelance journalist

MAJOR UN REFORM PROPOSALS FOCUS ON 'BIG TICKET' REFORMS SUCH AS SECURITY COUNCIL COMPOSITION—but there are other ways in which UN organs make changes.

The primary purpose of the UN has been ‘to save generations from the scourge of war’. In order to deal with the changing nature of threats to peace and to continue as a legitimate enforcer of international norms, UN reform has been proposed from many different angles. But there are enduring tensions between theories in international law and the practicalities of its enforcement.

The Security Council is the organ charged with responding to threats to peace and security, which is why it has been at the centre of reform debates. Some argue that adding new members to the Council will remedy its democratic and representative deficit: Brazil, India, Japan and Germany want a permanent seat in the Council, adding to the Permanent 5 (US, UK, Russia, France and China). The question is whether Security Council reform is feasible as long as certain members have the power to veto and are reluctant to share this power: the UN’s own High-Level Panel reform proposals have been rejected by both China and the US. While increasing geographical representation is theoretically sound, the fact that Brazil’s President Lula recently defended the legitimacy of Iran’s elections is alarming if his country is considered a front-runner for a permanent seat.

Kenneth Anderson, a Washington College of Law professor who sits on a number of UN reform think-tanks, makes two interesting points: The first is that the members of the Security Council must necessarily be the great powers, good and bad among them, because power is power, but that this fact by nature limits the moral authority of the Council. The second is that beyond the Security Council, only around half of the Members States of the UN are democracies. One solution in light of this, put forth by Anderson among others, is for the Council to scale down its activities in addressing peace and security. However, I believe that the present Security Council is better than none at all, and agree with UN Secretary-General Special Adviser Edward Luck that ‘the Council remains a place of hope, a place to do some serious business, and a place few member States would do without, reform or no reform’. And while reform may look a long way off now, it may still be possible in the future.

If so-called ‘big ticket’ reforms of the UN, which will consensus and Charter amendment, look unlikely for now through lack of political will or otherwise, there are other ways in which the UN and its bodies enforce their core agendas. This is known among international legal scholars as ‘reform through practice’, which is the main process of implementing reform, and remains relatively unexplored.

One example is the reform of the Human Rights Commission, The legitimacy of which the former in advocating human rights was in question because it allowed membership of States with bad human rights records, such as Zimbabwe, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s suggestion as part of his 2005 reform proposals (‘In Larger Freedom) called for a smaller body, with 47 members. The UN General Assembly voted in March 2006 to replace the Commission on Human Rights with the Human Rights Council.

Reform also comes from the judicial bodies of the UN. The expansion of Council powers (another example of reform through practice, in this case due to the widened definition of ‘threat of security’) includes powers to set up ad hoc criminal tribunals such as the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, (ICTY) which has influence on international security and the growing body of international criminal law. On the one hand, the US’s reluctance to sign the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court hampers considerably the multilateral power of the Court, but advances have been made in other ways in the meantime.

In the Prosecutor vs Dusko Tadic case, the ICTY found that violations of the law of internal armed conflict can lead to individual criminal responsibility. This was of considerable influence in the development of international humanitarian law. Finding the defendant guilty, established that the Tribunal’s jurisdiction in respect of crimes against humanity was not confined to armed conflicts. It also had considerable impact in the International Law Commission’s proposals for setting up the International Criminal Court, which was achieved in 1999.

The UN’s problems may be rooted in its institutional structures, or a lack of political will. It seems that political will is generated from history- for example, the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations in response to the need to reverse colonialism. In the absence of a broader historical impetus to provide political will for larger reforms, the advancement of the UN’s ambitions in peacekeeping will have to come in smaller but nonetheless effective steps.