UN: Senior Appointments

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, we are grateful to my noble friend Lord Dubs for giving us the opportunity to have this debate. I guess that one way to put it is that if we had to do it all over again, we might have something like the United Nations but not in the form and structure that it has at present. It is ultimately not a United Nations but a union of states. As my noble friend Lady Kinnock and others have said, there is lot of jousting between individual countries or regions to get their share of the spoils, posts and so on. There is great concern that there will be an interstate equity in terms of jobs and so on rather than a search for the best people who can do the job.

The United Nations also bears the mark of its origins in 1945. The fact that there are five permanent members of the Security Council with a veto power is not something that we would reproduce today if we had the chance. As my noble friend Lord Giddens pointed out, we are no longer in a hegemonic state where the United States or the Atlantic powers dominate the world. We are in the multi-polar situation that we all wanted and longed for. Here it is and what a mess it is.

I know this will not happen but I may as well say it. We really need a reorganised United Nations without a veto power for any permanent member. As I have said before in your Lordships’ House, we should perhaps follow the European Union and have qualified majority voting. Maybe we should have not just five but more members of the Security Council. With QMV, maybe we would then be able to get a slight improvement in the decision-making processes of the United Nations.

In respect of the Secretary-General’s appointment, the usual thing to say is that the permanent members want a secretary not a general, and they make quite sure that whoever is elected does not fulfil the criteria that the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, read out to us from those heady days of 1945. What we get is someone who will come from a suitably small country to which no permanent member objects, and who will not disturb the interests of any of the permanent members. That person will keep their nose clean and then they might be reappointed for five years. That is the way it has been.

In a sense, although it is normal to say what a great thing the United Nations is, I think it is a gigantic disappointment. It has failed to reform itself. When you look at it today, the biggest slaughter has been going on of Muslims by Muslims in the Middle East. That has gone on for many years and there has been absolutely no intervention or discussion by the United Nations. A refugee problem is bursting out all over the world, especially from the Middle East and Africa, but the EU is holding the baby and the United Nations is suitably absent.

In a sense, we have to give up any hope of the United Nations ever reforming. It will spend a lot of money and have lots of new causes such as climate change and this and that. A lot of agencies will proliferate and I have no doubt that a lot of people will make a lot of consultancy money. But at the end of the day, the central task of promoting or guaranteeing world peace has not been achieved by the United Nations in any form whatever that one can think of.

What do we do about the problem of the Secretary-General? There is a precedent. Many years ago, I did some consultation work on the human development report for the UNDP. The administrator for the UNDP used to be appointed by the American President. Someone who had given a lot of money to the President’s campaign fund used to get the job. Now the UNDP advertises openly for the administrator or whatever the person is called and selects the best person, so there is a precedent within the UN system—I know of one body that has done this. We ought to urge Her Majesty’s Government to pursue this idea as soon as possible. The job should be advertised and open for anyone to apply from across the world. While we may say that we would very much like a woman to be the Secretary-General, as I would, what we really ought to say is, “Let the best candidate be appointed regardless of the region they come from”. We cannot go on with the scandal of the rather poor quality of Secretary-General that we have had. It is as bad with the IMF, where you must have a European at its head all the time regardless of whether they are qualified. No one would have appointed Dominique Strauss-Kahn had they done any due diligence on his character. The same can be said—but I had better not insult anyone else. Let me just say that I wish Her Majesty’s Government luck either in achieving an open recruitment process or in having a woman as the Secretary-General. If they can do that, I think they will have succeeded.