UN: Senior Appointments

Lord Anderson of Swansea Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Swansea (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on his timely initiative. In the two elements of his Motion, he stressed rather less the effectiveness of the UN and more the procedures for the choice of the Secretary-General and leading officials. I endorse all that he said about that and, indeed, the very wise words from that great reservoir of experience, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. Like him, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply to his four points.

I will concentrate more on the effectiveness of the UN because it is a good time, after 70 years, to take stock of its performance. At first sight, after years of disillusion and powerlessness, we are indeed far from the central role in world affairs envisaged by the founding fathers after the memory of the failures of the League of Nations and in the context of the destruction of the Second World War. So after 70 years, how do we commemorate it? Do we celebrate, or do we have 10 minutes’ silence? I am among those who think that the glass is more than half full and that we should broadly celebrate.

It is unfair to level so many criticisms at the UN as a body. It is not an autonomous player. It is controlled by the permanent five. There is no independent military capacity. It is a forum for debate and sometimes of action, which is much valued particularly by smaller countries. On Tuesday, the Guardian, which is a natural supporter of the UN, had a major article entitled, “Expensive, bureaucratic and undemocratic: how can the UN be reformed?”. It is easy to criticise the sclerotic bureaucracy. When I asked a leading Swedish official, who alas died at Lockerbie, how many people worked for him, he said, “About half”.

There is corruption. I know someone who was a whistleblower working for the UN in west Africa. He reported that one of his seniors was dealing in diamonds. In fact, my former colleague was moved and not the person dealing in diamonds. There have been serious violations of human rights. One thinks of the allegations against the blue helmets in the Central African Republic. Often there have been silly policies, particularly during the communist era, and absurdities such as the so-called Commission on Human Rights with more than 60% of its resolutions criticising Israel and having members with appalling human rights records. There is an immobilism on reform and no serious prospect of the reform of the Security Council to bring it in line with the realities not of 1945 but of 2015.

There are major policy failures. Critics can point out that one of the first challenges to the new organisation came when the UK gave up its mandate over Palestine. The United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 of November 1947 chose to divide Palestine into two states—one Jewish and one Arab. On 21 April 2015, when the Secretary-General addressed the Security Council, he spoke of,

“decades of missed opportunities and failures”,

with the prospect of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict based on two states even further away,

“with potentially explosive consequences”.

Yet all reasonable people know the broad lines of what should be a solution to that problem. Surely we do not have to conclude that some problems in the world are insoluble.

We can look at successes and failures over its history. In the 1980s, there were successes. I was marginally involved in the great success on Namibia. At that time, the wonderfully enthusiastic officials in the United Nations Transition Assistance Group, UNTAG, were saying, “Today Namibia, tomorrow western Sahara”. But it was not to be. There were great failures in the 1990s. I think of the failures, for example, of Srebrenica and of the genocide in Rwanda.

The UN is a forum for debate. It seeks consensus and is a source of legal authority, as we see in the current migration debate on the interpretation of Article 51 on self-defence. We in Britain continue to send some of our finest diplomats to the United Nations. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, with his background would not dissent from that.

One could give a whole catalogue of examples, such as the environment, climate change, the development goals, and a whole series of areas under the specialised agencies, including peacekeeping. Jean-Marie Guéhenno, who was the head of peacekeeping for a number of years, said in a recent article in The World Today:

“The United Nation’s peacekeeping operations are in deep trouble after 15 years in which the number of its blue helmets deployed has risen from 20,000 to 120,000”.

There are areas of conflict, but we say, rather like Voltaire’s God, that if the United Nations were not there we would have to invent it or something like it.

I adopt much of what was said by my noble friends Lord Dubs and Lady Kinnock, by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, about the need for a woman. Surely there must be a woman of sufficient eminence over the years to have qualified for that post—someone like Gro Harlem Brundtland, for example. What is the Government’s position? Surely the Executive in this country cannot rely on just secrecy. We need to have a more open debate in our own country. It is surely not too much to ask the Government to spell out very clearly the criteria that they consider important. I hope that this debate will at least provide an opportunity for the Minister to spell out what the Government are looking for in the new appointment—not, I would expect, a general or a secretary, but I hope a very competent woman.