United Nations General Assembly 2018: IRC Report

Lord Collins of Highbury Excerpts

Thursday 6th September 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for his introduction and his committee’s second report on the UN. There is consensus across the Chamber over the committee’s conclusions that the UN is under considerable strain and that the General Assembly represents an opportunity for the United Kingdom to continue to champion multilateralism—a point made by my noble friend Lord Judd.

Like noble Lords, in the other place today my right honourable friend Emily Thornberry paid tribute to Kofi Annan, who sadly passed away three weeks ago. She referred to his 2007 speech to Parliament, marking the abolition of the British slave trade. His words then resonate just as strongly today. Of the men and women who fought to abolish the slave trade, he said that they,

“represented a moral truth that seemed remote from the ways of the world, a moral passion that must at first have seemed utterly impracticable. Yet by persistence, by resolve, by eloquence, and by imagination, they changed history. They showed that moral persuasion could prevail over narrow self-interest”.

It is the same challenge today. We are living through a period where the world order and the international rules that are supposed to underpin it are under greater threat than at any time since the 1930s. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, acknowledged this in April at the high-level meeting of the UNGA when welcoming the Secretary-General’s vision for building and sustaining peace, particularly the renewed focus on conflict prevention. As said by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in an earlier debate on the UN Secretary-General, the UN—for all its weaknesses—remains an essential global institution and the linchpin of a rules-based international order, which it is in Britain’s interest to support.

However, a real concern raised by Mr Hochschild to the committee is that some world leaders have signalled that they may not be willing to support the United Nations to the same degree as previously. That is putting it mildly, especially as the Administration in Washington, seem ready to disregard their international obligations—as highlighted by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay—on refugees and on paying the UN’s assessed contributions for regular and peacekeeping budgets. Sadly, whatever Trump has done, the Government’s hand has remained outstretched in the hope of some mythical free trade deal to solve the mess they are making of Brexit. If we are to have the international security and stability that we seek, diplomacy, development and defence have to go together.

Rather than those three Ds, the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, summarised the Government’s approach as four Ds: diversification of the tools deployed by the UN to promote and sustain peace; development, with more effective interventions to address the drivers of conflict; diplomacy, to de-escalate crises and create the political conditions for long-term peace; and finally, perhaps most importantly, delivery in efficient partnerships with others. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, was making this point. Can the Minister tell us what form this approach will take at the forthcoming General Assembly? How will we work with our partners to deliver this strategy? On development, the UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development, a network of more than 1,000 organisations, suggests that the UK is performing poorly on three-quarters of the SDGs. How will the Government use the General Assembly to engage with other member states on their respective strategies for meeting the 2030 agenda? On delivery, the problem we face comes down to countries ignoring the rules that should govern our world. It is incumbent on all of us to stand up for the world order, to stand up for human rights and international treaties and to insist on working, through the United Nations, for peace.

If we want a world order based on international rules, then we must apply the same rules equally to every country, whether they are military allies or not, whether we trade with them or not, and whether Donald Trump wants us to or not. This is the only way we will restore what Kofi Annan called moral truth, moral passion and moral persuasion to our country’s foreign policy.