Whom Do U.N. Officials Think They Work For?
By John Bolton
04/02/2010
The Enterprise Blog
Original Source: – HYPERLINK http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/0302/Bluster-at-UN-Human-Rights-Council-as-US-and-Iran-trade-barbs http://blog.american.com/?p=12182

It should be beyond dispute that the United Nations and its specialized agencies are organizations of member governments. Member governments create the organizations, pay for them, and direct them. Accordingly, employees of these organizations (the  secretariats ) work at the collective behest of the member governments, as their subordinate staff.
The operative word should be  subordinate,  but high-ranking U.N. officials too often seem to have trouble finding dictionaries that define that word for them. Mohammed el-Baradei, the former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, could never quite seem to understand that he worked for the IAEA s member governments, not the other way around.
Now we see another eruption of inadequate vocabulary education from the director general of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan of China. Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE62N5AU20100324 reports that she decided to opine on the recently enacted U.S. healthcare legislation by saying,  the people in this country and their leaders are courageous. That is an unprecedented achievement.  After interjecting herself gratuitously in one of the most hotly debated domestic political issues in the United States in recent years, Chan, a physician, then offered a little free economic advice:  Market forces, all by themselves, will not solve social problems &  Health concerns can, in some instances, be more important than economic interests. 
The issue is not whether one agrees with Chan, but on what basis she is intervening in our domestic affairs to begin with. To be sure, Chan is not alone in thinking that U.N. civil servants can interfere at will in the domestic affairs of their supposed governors (not to mention paymasters). Because U.S. officials in the past have, unfortunately, routinely failed to remind U.N. secretariats to stay in their lanes, and because many European governments positively welcome their frolics as they do those of the European Union s bureaucracy, these lapses have become more commonplace.
Re-righting the hierarchy in U.N. agencies governments in charge, secretariats their humble servants is a good place to start the thoroughgoing U.N. reform we and the U.N. still so desperately need.