CIVICUS

FROM THE DESK OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

Reflections on the United Nations Summit

The French version is available at Réflexions sur le Sommet des Nations Unies.

Release Date: 30 September 2005

By Kumi Naidoo, CIVICUS Secretary General and chair of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP)

Many civil society organisations from around the world sent representatives to New York to lobby national delegations to take decisive action at the much anticipated World Summit. Many campaigners from developing countries and their allies in the developed world came to the UN with a common expectation: The world’s rich countries have had time to chew over the issues affecting the poorest nations. The World Summit had to be a time to swallow hard and take action.

However, this largest ever gathering of the world’s political leaders at the United Nations World Summit has failed the poor. The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP), the alliance which includes 91 national coalitions and several political leaders from developing countries, has expressed deep disappointment at the decisions emanating from the summit.

World leaders have missed a historic opportunity to take clear steps in the fight against poverty and towards sustainable human development. Instead they simply recycled, rehashed and repeated old promises.

The world witnessed with great dismay how merely referring to the five-year-old Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) became a contentious issue when newly appointed US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, claimed that America did not sign up to them.

Moreover, in the face of rising poverty levels, there is an absence of commitments that seriously hold governments accountable for their poor performance in implementing the MDGs, which GCAP considers Minimalist Development Goals.

Acknowledgement of missing the first goal, which deals with achieving universal primary education by 2005, is conspicuously absent from the summit resolutions. No sense of urgency is evident, and no action plan or proper resourcing strategy has been proposed to put the world back on track to meet these goals.

The summit, at the insistence of the US government, took a step backwards with regard to a commitment made by developed countries 35 years ago to contribute less than 1% of gross national income – just 0.7% – for development.

Only five developed countries meet this obligation today, with the UK government committed to meeting this target by 2013, two years before the MDGs are supposed to be met. This commitment is now read as an optional act of goodwill on the part of rich countries, rather than an act of justice and historical address for previous crimes against humanity, such as colonialism and slavery. Neither was the problem of the quality of aid tackled with any urgency.

With regard to the call for debt cancellation for the poorest countries, appeals by anti-poverty campaigners for the UN to go beyond the G8 debt deal – which GCAP has described as a “belated, small step in the right direction” – to include a larger number of countries and to eliminate the debilitating conditions that debt cancellation packages can impose on poor countries, have been ignored.

The UN summit, like the G8 Gleneagles summit, failed to make the decisions that will move us towards a global trading system that is characterised by equality and fairness. Unless trade justice is achieved, we will not have a sustainable pathway out of poverty.

On nuclear disarmament, reform of the UN, climate change and specific areas of human development such as education and health, the decisions of the UN summit are at best half a step forward and two steps backward. The decisions of the summit confirm that certain countries can hold back the majority of humanity who want peace, justice and an end to the reality that 50,000 people die every day from preventable causes as a result of dehumanising poverty.

Does this mean that the UN has let down the world’s poor? Yes and no. If by the UN we mean the secretary-general and his staff and the majority of governments in the world, then the answer is probably no. If by the UN we mean the formal decisions of the world body, then indeed it has done so dismally.

In the current global context where real power around issues such as the environment, trade, debt and economic issues, terrorism and security, are unable to be addressed solely at a national level, more attention needs to be given to the workings of inter-governmental organisations such as the World Bank, the IMF and the UN.

Given the shift of power from national to global levels, it has become a priority to ensure that the “democracy deficit” of these powerful institutions is addressed.

Global institutions such as the UN, World Bank and IMF wield great power over the lives of ordinary people around the world and should be accountable to those people. Herein lies the crux of the “democracy deficit”: decisions affecting the lives and wellbeing of people around the world – about trade rules, intellectual property rights, macro-economic restructuring policies, privatisation of vital services, and debt relief – are increasingly made behind closed doors by institutions that are not directly accountable to those people affected, and which are not accessible to citizen voices.

Civil society participation at the summit itself was highly restricted. After much lobbying, three civil society speakers addressed the summit: Leonor Briones from Social Watch Philippines and GCAP Asia; Gina Vargas, a feminist activist from Latin America and Guy Ryder, the General Secretary of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and one of the GCAP spokespersons. By the time Gina and Guy addressed the General Assembly gathering, the summit’s outcome document had been adopted and most delegates had left the hall. Civil society hearings had been held in June to get civil society input to the formal process, but the views expressed by civil society at these pre-summit hearings do not appear to have been seriously considered. However, some of the government delegations did include civil society activists, which was very helpful in getting intelligence briefings of how the negotiations were going. Overall, for an organisation whose charter starts with the words: “We the peoples of the United Nations…”, civil society participation is sorely limited.

Many of the global institutions, such as the UN, that have become increasingly powerful in recent years, were created in a very different context from that in which we find ourselves today. Even now, the governance structures of the UN continue to be dominated by the geopolitics of 1945. We need to concede that the UN appears to be operating under rules and logic that are not in keeping with the realities that citizens confront in the world today.

Besides a legitimacy deficit, there is also a coherence deficit in the way the international system operates - finance ministers rush off to the IMF and World Bank, foreign ministers rush off to the UN and trade ministers go to the World Trade Organisation; all remaining separate. The system urgently needs to be made more coherent and accountable.

But perhaps the biggest deficit of all is a compliance deficit. If past performance is anything to go by, many governments will have forgotten the limited commitments they made at this UN summit by the time they return to their capitals. It is unacceptable that not only do these costly summits make weak, timid and tepid decisions, but that even these half-hearted commitments are routinely not implemented.

This time around, the growing global anti-poverty movement will continue to push for the courageous decisions that are needed to create a more just, equitable and secure world – and metaphorically, hold the feet of governments to the fire in terms of ensuring that there is no further wriggling out of commitments made in the past or at this summit.

However, there is an elephant in the room today, one we avoid mentioning when we talk about creating a global system of decision-making that is fair, transparent and equitable, and that is the current United States government. President George Bush, for example, has conceded that the current trading system is unfair to poor countries and said that he was willing to scrap trade-distorting subsidies if other rich countries did the same.

But this position underlines a bigger challenge. We live in a world where there is a sole superpower, which has shown a propensity towards acting unilaterally on several occasions. It has also shown great political will when faced with an agenda it deems is in its interests – mobilising hundreds of billions of dollars for a war lacking popular support or legal legitimacy or, for that matter, ensuring the scrapping of Iraq’s entire debt of $30 billion.

I would say this to President Bush: Sir, this time on this crucial question of trade justice, we would welcome some benign unilateralism and leadership. If you think it is just to scrap US subsidies, then please do it and do not dither and wait for others to do so as well!

The American government is letting down its own people and the people of the world. If we had a US delegation at the UN arguing forcefully for the elimination of world poverty in concrete terms, for full gender equality and for nuclear disarmament, and advocating an urgent set of measures to save the environment for future and current generations, this summit would have been very different.

The majority of US citizens believe their government contributes 10-15% of its income to international development. The sad truth is that it contributes just 0.19%. The UN can and should be more effective in serving the world’s poor, however, it remains dependent on whether the richest and most powerful nation, and some of its close allies, will allow the UN to achieve this promise. Optimistically, US citizens and those of other rich countries, show repeatedly that they are far ahead of their politicians in their understanding of the importance of global solidarity, in their sense of a common global citizenship and in their generosity.

Let us hope that the horrors wreaked by hurricanes Katrina and Rita will not see the US government turn further inwards, but will bring home the realities of what poverty means for citizens in rich and poor countries – an inhumanity which is unnatural and preventable.

If there is political will on the part of the countries that make up the UN, particularly the most powerful economically and otherwise, the UN has the ability to serve the interests of the poor and voiceless. However, democratising the governance of the UN and other global institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, requires an urgent effort if they are to make policies that enable us to create a world of greater justice, peace, equality and security.

Please send your comments and suggestions to e-mail kumi@civicus.org

In solidarity,

Kumi Naidoo

Below you will find all previous columns:

• Civil society gears up for the UN World Summit

• Reflections on the G8 Summit

• Nelson Mandela: Inspiring civil society efforts to create a just world

• Children, youth and the struggle for a just world

• So we think democracy is growing?: Rethinking social exclusion

• You can make difference on ‘Whiteband Day’ - 1 July 2005

• CSW Monthly Bulletin provides a global forum to protect the rights of civil society

• What does democracy really mean today

• The absence of democracy at the World Bank

• Grassroots activism: ordinary people making an extraordinary difference

• Madrid, Manhattan, Manica and Musina: Civic activism driving the agenda for social and political justice

• On International Women's Day civil society wonders if this is Beijing Plus Ten or Beijing Minus Ten

• Internal governance: Responding to the challenge of civil society legitimacy, accountability and transparency

• Poverty or social exclusion - What unites civil society in the North and South?

• Should civil society engage with governing institutions even when they have deep democratic deficits?

• One month gone, eleven to go: Is 2005 the year civil society focuses on its common shared values and agrees to disagree on strategy and tactics?

• The beginnings of the biggest ever mobilisation against poverty launched at the World Social Forum

• Civil Society gears up for a major global campaign against poverty

• What the Tsunami Tragedy means for Civil Society.

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