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3.34 pm
Hugh Robertson (Faversham and Mid-Kent): It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Newport, East (Alan Howarth). His was a very lucid and balanced speech, and I hope that it will not embarrass him if I say that it was hard for me to disagree with anything he said. It was an excellent contribution.
I have a direct personal interest in the UN. As a young Army officer, I served in the UN force in Cyprus in 1988. In 1994, I returned to Bosnia for six months, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. I have always supported the UN but, in common with many hon. Members, I am not blind to its problems.
It would be fair to start by saying that there are a number of areas in which the UN has done exceptionally well. The UN General Assembly is a parliament of nations, with 191 members. Any state that becomes a member signs the UN charter and pledges to uphold its principles. In this world, that is worth having on its own.
The UN Economic and Social Council—ECOSOC—co-ordinates the economic and social work of the UN and its family of organisations. It has five regional committees that promote economic development and
co-operation in their regions. Other bodies focus on human rights, social development, women, crime prevention, drugs and environmental protection. Other UN bodies do fine work in their own fields. They include the UNHCR, UNICEF, the UN Development Programme, and UNESCO. In addition, specialist agencies are linked to the UN through co-operative agreements. They include the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the International Civil Aviation Organisation. The UN has a considerable record of achievement, of which it can justifiably be proud.In addition, the UN millennium development goals were announced at the millennium summit in September 2000. The pledges made then, among others, were to halve poverty and hunger by 2015, to achieve universal primary education, to combat HIV/AIDS, to ensure environmental sustainability, and to bring down the level of child mortality, which are all extremely worthwhile.
I believe, however, that debt relief is key. Globalisation should be used as a force for good, by giving developing countries access to markets that currently are denied to them. It is daft to give developing countries debt relief, yet deny them the ability to export their goods. It is vital to break the link between dependency and debt.
The UN has done good work in a number of other areas, but it has also attracted criticism. Peacekeeping is one example, and several other hon. Members have spoken about it. The House may be surprised to learn that the UN has been involved in 56 operations since 1948, but the record is rather mixed.
There are two types of UN peacekeeping operations—chapter VI operations, when the Security Council acts in a persuasive capacity, and chapter VIII operations, when the resolutions are mandatory, and the measures adopted are coercive.
A number of chapter VI operations have been extremely successful, such as those in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique. In Cyprus, the UN force maintains the peace but until recently the intransigence of the parties involved has resulted in a lack of progress. Even on the Golan heights, the UN has managed to maintain a level of peace, but the situation has, of course, yet to be resolved.
Recent chapter VI operations have developed and become more all embracing. They do not deliver only a military solution, but involve delivering humanitarian aid, organising elections, and administering states' economic and social development. In many ways, Bosnia offers an extremely good example of all that.
I believe that the history of UN operations teaches us three things. If chapter VI operations are to work, they require a measure of co-operation from the participants. That means, first, that the parties involved must agree to stop fighting and settle their differences. Secondly, there has to be an acceptance of the UN's negotiating and peacekeeping role. Thirdly, adequate manpower and financial resources must be made available. Without that, it is extremely difficult for an operation to be successful.
For those reasons, the chapter VIII operations have fared less well. The sanctions that often act as a precursor do not always work as a coercive device that
falls short of military force. Arms embargoes, oil embargoes and wider economic measures have not worked in places such as Iraq, Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, Angola, South Africa and, many years ago, in Southern Rhodesia. There were many ways of getting round such sanctions.The military structures built into chapter VIII operations do not always work well. The contributing countries almost always insist on a measure of command and control, or want it delegated to an organisation such as NATO. For entirely understandable reasons, unless they have some control, western Governments are often unwilling to commit troops to stop people killing one another. Hon. Members will be aware of the wider feeling that the essence of the UN is incompatible with the use of force in such circumstances. We have to acknowledge that the UN's peacekeeping record has been mixed. If it is to be successful, it is crucial that the parties involved want to stop fighting and to settle their differences.
I want to touch on two other points where the UN's record is mixed, the first of which is justice. We have already talked about the International Court of Justice at The Hague, but there is more to international justice than a court. Events during the build-up to the war in Iraq showed that the legal backdrop of the UN needs updating, as the Foreign Secretary said at Question Time today. That should hardly surprise us, as those legal bases were drawn up more than 50 years ago, since when the world has changed considerably. As countries increasingly use the UN to establish the legitimacy of their actions, a rethink of the whole matter is vital.
The second point relates to human rights. Put brutally, many UN members have failed to live up to the principles embodied in the universal declaration of human rights. It may be invidious to name particular countries, but Burma, Algeria, Iraq, Sudan and, most notably, Zimbabwe are only a few examples. As hon. Members are aware, Libya was recently elected chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights. That is clearly wrong.
When we consider the balance sheet, we see that the UN has excelled in many things, especially in the economic and social sphere, and has done much that is positive, such as peacekeeping, on which its record is more mixed. As I pointed out, much remains to be done on justice and human rights.
What is to be done about reforming the United Nations? I have six suggestions; three are practical and three are more theoretical. My first practical suggestion is that the financing of the UN needs to be reformed. Certain countries pay disproportionate sums; the United States, the EU and Japan pay approximately 75 per cent. of the contributions, which is far too much. The US contribution has a marked effect on military operations and, in effect, gives the US a form of veto over peacekeeping operations.
We should work for a new system in which the United States and Japan pay about 10 per cent., the EU pays about 35 per cent. and a much greater percentage—about 45 per cent.—comes from others. The Gulf states, Singapore, Malaysia, China, Russia, India, Canada and Australia, to name but a few, could all contribute much more than they do currently.
Secondly, the structure of the UN should be reformed. That suggestion should not be surprising; the format was established in the post-war climate and flourished during the cold war, but the world is now a different place. Threats are less local and more globalised, and include terrorism, drugs and immigration and environmental issues. The structure of the UN must reflect that. A wide-ranging review should be conducted, and the Minister mentioned that such work is under way. It should include such things as the powers of the Secretary-General, which, by any standards, are extraordinarily wide at present. The subjects for debate at the General Assembly need clarification. Kofi Annan has described the debates as repetitive and sterile. The number and powers of members of the Security Council must be examined. I would support an increase in the number of members, but we must be careful about increasing the right of veto in case that merely leads to inaction.
There needs to be a streamlining and refocusing of UN agencies. As I said at the start of my speech, we have a huge number of UN agencies, which could be restructured and refocused. We need to examine the way in which the UN interacts with non-governmental organisations. I saw a number of good examples of that in Bosnia, where the connection between the UN and NGOs was not great. The UN stood at the top of the pile and very much believed that it was in charge of the process, and a lot of the NGOs felt that they did not get the support that they required from the UN as the lead agency.
Across the UN, working methods and decision-making processes need to be improved. We must improve the transparency of the entire organisation. The responses to the crises that we face in the modern world must also be examined. They need to be much more wide-ranging, not just military, diplomatic, humanitarian, legal and so forth. The structures currently do not reflect that. As everyone would agree, there is too much bureaucracy and waste.
The final practical suggestion is that the UN should seek actively to recruit and retain better-quality staff. The organisation can only be a reflection of the standard of the people who work in it. I shall share with the House a horror story. When I was working with the UN in Bosnia, a permanently employed UN civil servant, who occupied one of the key positions in northern Bosnia, could neither read nor write English, yet he was expected to fill out weekly returns. In the current era, that is simply unacceptable.
Too many people occupy senior positions because they are their country's representatives, rather than because they deserve to be there on merit. Too many special representatives of the Secretary-General—SRSGs—in individual countries are there because they know the right people at the right time. I should have thought that, if we are to make any progress with the UN, it must have in place a proper recruiting structure, open to everyone, with appropriate educational opportunities for all those who enter its service.
We might also take a look at some of the UN's governing principles. Ever since it first began, the UN has supported the integrity of states within their existing frontiers. However, as we all know, many of those frontiers are artificial or unrealistic. A good example is our experience in Bosnia, where a viable country was
created by using new frontiers. There are other recent examples in places as diverse as Nagorno-Karabakh and, possibly more controversially, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The UN must not ignore that sea change.In common with many other hon. Members, I support the desire for more effective preventive action. Action must be taken to defuse crises before they explode into warfare. The agenda for peace and the Secretary-General's annual report for 1993 focused on exactly that topic. It has been alive for 10 years, yet I have not seen an enormous amount of constructive action. Effective proactive measures are vital if many of the threats that we face in today's world are not to come about.
Finally, on a military basis, we must look at the command and control of the forces that the UN deploys under chapter VI or chapter VIII. There needs to be a proper military staff at the UN headquarters and the Security Council needs to be in strategic, political command, with the day-to-day control of operations delegated to an SRSG or to its force commander. The current set-ups, which are often too complicated, simply do not work well.
In conclusion, as I said at the outset of the debate, I am still extremely supportive of the UN. It has achieved a great deal in nearly 60 years of its existence. One can genuinely say that the glass is half-full, not half-empty. However, everyone would agree that the UN needs reform. I have made a number of suggestions, particularly about its structure, financing and recruitment policy. Other hon. Members will have other good ideas, as has the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
The more that I thought about the subject and revisited a number of case studies, the more one central factor became obvious: the UN can certainly defuse crises, separate combatants and set the stage for negotiations, but it often cannot solve the underlying disputes—only the parties themselves can do that. To that extent, the UN is not so much a tool as a mirror: its failings are very often our failings. Some years ago, Lord Caradon, the former head of the UK's mission, said while examining the United Nations:
- "The faults and weaknesses of the UN lie not in the charter or the organisation but in the defects of its most powerful members".
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