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4.17 pm
Mr. Tony Colman (Putney): It is interesting to follow the advocacy of the hon. and gallant Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) on behalf of the HALO Trust. Having accompanied him to Angola when we were both members of the International Development Committee, I heard him take up those charges with the United Nations. I hope that the Minister may want to take the matter further, because it is an extraordinary situation.
I declare an interest as chair of the all-party group on the United Nations and a member of the United Nations Association.
At 11.30 on this Remembrance day, a ceremony took place at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, as it does every year, to remember those who have died in the service of the United Nations. Last year, that service was led by Sergio Vieira de Mello. This year, of course, we mourned his sad death, and also that of Fiona Watson, who was formerly a researcher in the international section of the Library, in that terrible explosion on 19 August. That brings home to us the importance of having this debate today.
Last week, I was honoured to chair the meeting for the Ralph Bunche memorial lecture, celebrating the 100 years since the birth of Ralph Bunche, who was perhaps a predecessor to Mr. Vieira de Mello, covering the years from 1945 to 1971, when he died. It was a very inspiring lecture, given by Sir Brian Urquhart, whose biography of Ralph Bunche I recommend. It is well worth reading, and I shall be delivering it back to the House of Commons Library soon. The meeting was full—standing room only—with ambassadors, members of the diplomatic corps, Members of this House and the other place, and members of the public attending. That demonstrates the concern, which people are now understanding, that the United Nations is the key game in town—indeed, the only game in town—and that it needs to be supported, talked up and respected.
A number of hon. Members have referred to the excellent Command Paper—Cm 5898—entitled "The United Kingdom in the United Nations", and I congratulate the Minister on publishing it this September, and, as others have said, on having the second debate on the Floor of the House on this subject within three months, as many of us had advocated.
Several hon. Members have talked about reform of the Security Council, but I would like to talk about other reforms. I suggest that there are areas into which the UN should have gone but has not yet fully done so, in terms of new specialist agencies. I accept that some might need to be folded within others, but I want to draw to the attention of the House an article in the Financial Times of 10 November, headed "Plan for UN to manage internet 'will be shelved'." The subject is to be discussed at next month's world information summit in Geneva, and I strongly suggest that we do not shelve the proposal. We should get the book out and ensure that the internet comes under the auspices of the United Nations, presumably within the International Telecommunication Union.
A second area that I would like the Minister to consider is one on which I challenged the Secretary of State for International Development in the House last week: taxation. The under-secretary general for social affairs at the United Nations General Assembly special session for finance and development two weeks ago said that if we were looking at world taxation and accounting systems, they should come within the UN. There should not be an international taxation system that is the same for every country, but the UN should have governance over the mechanisms and processes.
A third area is migration. It is extraordinary, given the enormous migratory flows around the world—I am talking about economic migrants, not refugees—that there is no basis on which the UN has a locus in that area. There is the International Organisation for Migration, but it is outside the United Nations.
A fourth area is the World Trade Organisation. We have the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development—UNCTAD—but in a sense the WTO was the organisation that got away in 1995. It should have come within UNCTAD at that time, and many of us would like to see greater moves being made to that end.
There are two areas in which the United Nations has specialist agencies that are in need of reform. The hon. and gallant Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson) mentioned the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which is based in Montreal. It has 188 member states, meets every two years, and decides what goes on in our airports and aeroplanes, and how airlines use the air. It has a wide range of programmes and sets environmental rules for the world.
Paragraph 209 of the Command Paper states that the ICAO has developed
- "a universal, effectively mandatory, programme of safety oversight audits."
The ICAO is largely a closed organisation, where the discussions are not open to the public. It is extremely important that we should continue to have high-level ministerial representation there. We should also ensure that this Parliament has representation at that next meeting, and that NGOs can fully lobby and be involved in decision making in respect of a UN agency that needs reform.
The next area that should briefly be mentioned is the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was referred to by the hon. Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) and my hon. Friend the Member for Tynemouth (Mr. Campbell). I have a particular interest here—my Nuclear Safeguards Bill eventually became the Nuclear Safeguards Act 2000—in terms of UK ratification of the additional protocol to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. I am pleased to see in the documentation the fact that there is to be a significantly increased budget in respect of the IAEA's safeguards work. Obviously, all of us are pleased that the efforts that have been made with Iran have borne fruit, as the Iranian Government have accepted coming within the work of the additional protocol. That is a good example of the UN moving forward on a new agenda.
I would like all weapons of mass destruction to come within an IAEA framework. I am sure that we all agree that it is a great shame that the chemical and biological weapons conventions seem to be stalled, but I suggest that the world will understand if we can advance the cause and move things forward.
I want to move on to the wider role of reform, which other hon. Members have not mentioned. What is the role of Parliaments in relation to the UN system? I was pleased to discover that, finally, the UN has given observer status to the Inter-Parliamentary Union. That is the first time that this has happened. Individual delegates from national Parliaments have been given the right to initiate resolutions and to speak, but plainly not to vote. There is much discussion about whether there should be a parallel Chamber to the UN General Assembly, so that discussions can take place among Parliaments alongside those among Governments. If it is now the norm, as it appears to be, to have IPU meetings alongside the ministerials at the WTO, why not do the same at the UN General Assembly if we are looking to reform the UN and increase its legitimacy?
Another area is ensuring that the role of civil society is much fuller and more properly looked after. A major piece of work is being done on that, and I urge all Members to encourage their constituents to engage in it, as there is a real sense of disempowerment among many NGOs. That was picked up by the hon. Member for Blaby, who talked about that on the ground, as it were, but it is felt also at the UN in New York and in Geneva.
The next area was picked up by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey)—how do we promote the UN's importance, the hope that the UN gives, the role of the World Federation of United Nations Associations and the UN associations in the UK? I pay tribute to Sir Richard Jolly, chair of the UK United Nations Association, and Malcolm Harper, the chief executive.
When I was at Cambridge university, I was chair of the UN association, which had some 7,000 members—nearly three quarters of the student population. It was rather larger than the Labour and Conservative clubs. That was in 1963–64. Such involvement among the student community is something that I would like to be revived. However, there is a tremendous network of UNAs out there in each of our constituencies that we need to support. I pay tribute to my own Putney UNA—chairman Dave Crookenden, vice-chair Rob Storey and secretary Jo Stokes. I am very proud to be its vice-president.
I believe that the United Nations is the one hope for the world. At today's Remembrance day service in Putney, the final prayer ran as follows:
- "Let us pray for the peace of the world . . . and for men and women the world over that they may find justice and freedom and live in security and peace".
4.30 pm
Mr. Crispin Blunt (Reigate): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Putney (Mr. Colman), who speaks with such authority about the UN and his contribution to the UN association. I agree with him about Fiona Watson's contribution. I hope that the House finds a way of recognising it permanently, as we should recognise the contribution of other servants and, indeed, Members of the House who have gone on to do other things and have lost their lives in the service of this country—or, as in this instance, the service of the international community.
I am sure that Sir Brian Urquhart will be delighted by the hon. Gentleman's endorsement of his book, and will regret only that he had to borrow it from the library rather than buying it.
I am not certain that I can logically go as far as the hon. Gentleman and agree that the UN is the only hope for the world, but I do not think anyone could dispute its enormous importance. After all, in September 2002 the President of the United States—a president leading a Republican Administration—found it necessary, amid all the fears about the isolation of the US, to go to the UN and justify his appeal for global support for what it wanted to do in Iraq in terms of Security Council resolutions that already existed. To sweeten the pill, he announced that the US would rejoin UNESCO. That demonstrated that even the United States, the hyperpower referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter), needs the support of the entire international community. The UN is the only body that exists for that purpose, and if it did not exist we would have to invent it.
I do not agree with critics who have tried to make parallels with the League of Nations and have said how ineffective the UN is. Almost every nation in the world—if not every nation—belongs to the UN: even Switzerland, having sat on the sidelines for so long, has now decided to join. It is easy to list the UN's failures, and I shall list some of them shortly, but it is the best—probably the only—body to deal with not just security issues but all the issues of world governance arising from the 12 UN agencies. I am thinking of the World Health
Organisation, the international aerospace agreements mentioned by the hon. Member for Putney, and all the other subsidiary bodies.I agree with the hon. Member for Bristol, West (Valerie Davey) about the importance of the aspiration and inspiration that the UN must provide. The UN did not give explicit approval for the military operations involved in the recent conflicts in Iraq and Kosovo, but the international community and the powers that had taken action had to return to it to secure authority for the subsequent operations and political developments in those places. It is, however, seriously undermined by its administrative and practical failures as an organisation.
A week ago, the Financial Times published a report of a serious corruption inquiry involving the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. There is the extraordinary business of charges being made by a senior official in the United Nations office that tackles drugs and crime. That body is involved in a fight to deal with corruption within its own organisation. The report went on to highlight the complaint of Samuel Gonzalez-Ruiz, whom it described as
- "a former head of Mexico's anti-Mafia unit who advises governments on fighting corruption".
- "quit his post last week in protest at what he called 'corruption and mismanagement' in the agency, including 'misappropriation of funds', 'nepotism' and 'traffic of influence . . . In his resignation letter"—
- "management ignored repeated reports of wrongdoing by officials, despite having detailed evidence. He charged that whistleblowers were routinely punished and that perpetrators were sheltered by senior management."
- "I do not have the stomach to be promoting a fight against organised crime and corruption around the world when I am working in an office that tolerates administrative and in some cases criminal violations".
My hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson) referred to his experience of a senior UN official in northern Bosnia being unable to carry out simple functions. While working for Sir Malcolm Rifkind when he was Secretary of State for Defence and then Foreign Secretary, I visited United Nations operations in Bosnia and elsewhere. As a British soldier, I visited fellow British troops wearing blue berets in Cyprus and saw the administration there. We sometimes see brilliant United Nations officials of all nationalities carrying out their work but there appears to be the most astonishing inconsistency in performance. People are put into post simply because they come from a particular nation that has to have bums on seats—jobs have to be distributed to people from those nations. Frankly, they are a serious let-down to the whole organisation.
To be fair, I want particularly to commend the efforts of the current Secretary-General to tackle that problem. He is the one who appointed Martti Ahtisaari to report on the consequences of 19 August—the bombing in Baghdad and the wider consequences for the United
Nations. If an organisation is prepared to paint as deeply unflattering a picture of the way it works as he does, there is hope that that organisation is becoming significantly more self-critical and will improve. However, we cannot be complacent when Martti Ahtisaari identifies unclear chains of command, flouted guidelines, a lack of accountability and naivety about the security environment. That naivety led to the tragedy on 19 August. Frankly, it is totally unacceptable that an international organisation of the stature of the United Nations working in Baghdad in August 2003 displayed that naivety. It led to that tragedy, with all the consequences for the work of United Nations organisations in Iraq.The scale of that disaster, combined with what has happened to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad, is a serious setback to everything that the international community is seeking to achieve in Iraq and a serious setback for the people of Iraq, even if they are hostile to what the occupying powers are doing. One can hardly think of a greater own goal than the combination of those two attacks, not least in the case of the Red Cross, part of whose responsibility is to check on prisoners whom the occupying forces have taken to ensure that they are properly looked after.
The hon. Member for Tweeddale, Ettrick and Lauderdale (Mr. Moore), the Liberal Democrat spokesman, drew our attention to the United Nations Congo operation. I intervened on him. He made the point about the European Union's contribution to those operations. He said that the EU contributed to the operation at the request of the UN. The trouble is our lack of commitment to the UN, as demonstrated by the fact that that request had to be negotiated between the EU and the UN. The EU was not prepared, in effect, to support unconditionally the ongoing operation in the Congo, probably for sound military reasons. No responsible Defence Minister answerable to a Parliament in the EU would have been prepared to commit troops to the UN force as constituted in the Congo.
We must ask ourselves why we were prepared to allow a UN force to go to the Congo under chapter VI authority if it was ill-equipped to command and control the troops under its command and to deal with them safely to the standards on which we would have insisted had our troops been part of the original operation. We must ask ourselves searching questions. We were asked to contribute to the operation, but we were not prepared to do so. Are we saying that because the force was under the command of an Indian general under chapter VI, and because the troops were from developing countries, it did not matter if the force could not do things properly as it was never going to have the military weight to make a sensible military contribution to addressing the appalling conflict in the Congo? If so, the idea of first and second-class UN operations must be addressed.
I want to refer to reform and to make some constructive suggestions. We are not talking about the immediate future, but a debate such as this allows us to do some medium to long-term thinking. The UN has been in existence for 50 years and plainly it will develop in strength and importance because there is no alternative. It will be the vehicle, reformed as it will be, that will give us the authority of international law and the international deployment of troops.
I want to concentrate on security, not least because I know something about it. The three Back-Bench speakers from the Conservative party are all former servicemen and I hope that the House will forgive us for focusing on the security dimension of the UN, which is the most important element. All the relief work is important, but one cannot do that if one does not have a secure environment.
On the Secretariat and the reform that is taking place to it, Kofi Annan deserves commendation and support and the Government have made it clear in their Command Paper that Kofi Annan has their support. However, I want to contrast what the Government say about the secretariat with what they later say about the reform of the Security Council. It is right that the UN secretariat's abilities and energies need to be harnessed to ensure that all appointments are made on merit. That would appear to be blindingly obvious.
Until the United Kingdom and every other contributor to the UN is prepared to surrender Buggins's turn when it comes to handing out jobs, we will never have appointment on merit. It is a huge problem, because every single contributor to the UN within every international forum competes for their men and women to have posts within the organisations. Somehow we have to break the cycle, and the UK, as a sizeable nation, should be uniquely placed to take an internationalist outlook on the reform of the UN. We should no longer look at things through the prism of what would appear to be a short-term national interest. Our long-term interests are absolutely bound up with making this organisation as efficient and effective as possible.
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