UN summit faces fiasco amid threat to reforms

By Mark Turner and Caroline Daniel
September 12, 2005
Financial Times
Wednesday's summit of world leaders teetered on the brink of fiasco on Monday as substantive reforms promoting human rights and overhauling the UN's top management risked being killed off by a group of developing countries fearful of western intervention.
Diplomats said Russia, China and some middle-income developing countries had emasculated calls for a smaller, more effective human rights council to monitor violations by member states, as well as a new peace-building commission to tackle civil strife.
The details should be worked out later, said one Russian diplomat. We thought from the beginning we would not be able to agree all the modalities here.
Some developing countries have also rejected calls to move executive control of the UN away from the General Assembly to the secretariat in return for greater oversight by member states.
Diplomats said there might be some language on tighter auditing of UN management even though hopes that Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, would gain chief executive style powers, appeared to have fallen by the wayside.
They also claimed limited progress in securing a draft text mentioning the Millennium Development goals after the US initially sought to delete these targets halving extreme poverty by 2015.
Meanwhile, India was objecting to the establishment of a new international legal principle, the responsibility to protect people from atrocities in countries unable or unwilling to do so.
And tougher language on tackling terrorism was bogged down as some countries insisted that any condemnation of attacks upon civilians be balanced by another statement asserting the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination: a formulation that some saw as a get-out clause.
The reality is below expectations, said Heraldo Muņoz, Chilean ambassador. We are trying to avoid the details that separate us, but if the final outcome is without details, that would be a pity.
In spite of such gloom, some diplomats maintained that everything was still in play, and that the apparent impasse reflected brinkmanship.
There were some hopes that South Africa might mount a comeback on behalf of developing countries that did want reforms to succeed, possibly driven to a deal by fears that European promises of more development aid could be at risk if the summit failed. 
One UN official said that even if no real decisions were taken at the summit, talks on UN management reform, human rights and, perhaps most importantly, Security Council enlargement would be certain to continue afterwards. But other analysts suggest that in the UN, delaying a decision can be tantamount to burying it. Hopes the summit would agree to expand the Security Council died this summer when would-be new members failed to agree a common position on such reform.
In Washington on Monday, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argued that UN problems stemmed from wider political disagreement. 
Additional reporting by Caroline Daniel in Washington