Annan urges UN members to cut huge mandate list

By Evelyn Leopold 
March 30, 2006
Reuters
Original Source: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N30177904.htm

UNITED NATIONS, March 30 (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged member nations on Thursday to drop some of their 9,000 resolutions and directives on issues ranging from development to disarmament, many of which have long outlived their usefulness. 
Annan's report to the 191-member General Assembly was requested by world leaders at last September's U.N. summit, particularly the United States, in an effort to streamline the the world body's operations. 
This is not a call for the United Nations to do less, though that might be one result. It is a call for it to do better, Annan told the Assembly, which has issued nearly 79 percent of the mandates. The madndates have not been reviewed in full since 1954. 
Gouverner, c'est choisir (To Govern is to Choose), Annan said, quoting the 1950s French statesman Pierre Mendes-France. 
The U.N. secretariat, headed by Annan, was asked last year to produce some 1,200 reports and policy documents in addition to hundreds of oral briefings as a result of the mandates. 
In addition, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva in 2004 submitted 44,000 pages of documentation, some on overlapping requests, the report said. 
Among the examples in Annan's report are vague and unfulfilled commitments to gender equality and gender mainstreaming regarding women's rights in resolutions and human rights committees. 
About 10 percent of the mandates, some 900 of them, are more than five years old. 
Annan also questioned whether such Assembly creations as the Special Committee on the Charter of the United Nations had a reason to exist any longer. 
Sometimes the request for a report reflects a political compromise rather than a genuine need for information, Annan said in the report, noting that all the paperwork had to be translated into six languages. 
Other examples in his report include: 
-- Many U.N. resolutions on African development have not been updated since African nations in 2002 created NEPAD, the New Partnership for African Development. This has resulted in a mismatch between mandates and their impact on the ground. 
-- Terrorism is handled by three separate committees in the Security Council, requiring separate reports from 191 nations and separate visits to some of them. Those committees should be integrated, the report said. 
-- Separate drug control and crime prevention programs in Vienna should be combined. 
-- The disarmament commission for Iraq, known as the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which has not been able to enter Iraq since 2003. The Security Council, which eventually will close it down, should consider how the United Nations could use its expertise.