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The upcoming 79th session of the United Nations (“UN”) General Assembly will feature the Summit of the Future, intended to bolster the UN’s role in global governance.

A key component of the Summit is the proposed ‘Pact for the Future’, an initiative spearheaded by Secretary-General António Guterres, aiming to address global challenges like climate change, technological advancements and international security.

But, argues Brett Schaefer, the UN should be getting its own house in order rather than embarking on global governance pacts and calls for the US Congress to oppose the Pact for the Future.

On Monday, The Heritage Foundation published a report written by Brett Schaefer which argued that instead of attempting efforts such as the Pact for the Future (“Pact”), thereby bestowing additional responsibilities on the UN which is ineffective in managing its existing responsibilities, the UN Secretary-General should be calling for reassessment, retrenchment and refocus of the UN.

Schaefer notes the scope of the Pact is extraordinary.  “For example, a huge development aid ‘stimulus’; increased climate finance; endorsement of government censorship of misinformation and disinformation; establishment of rules and norms governing the use of artificial intelligence; and negotiation of legally binding instruments on autonomous weapons, arms in outer space and plastic pollution.”

The UN has these ambitions despite the international response to covid-19, for example, being highly flawed, UN peacekeeping being in retreat, negotiations floundering on divergent priorities and human rights violators holding sway in the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly.

As well as the concept of the Pact, the Pact itself is flawed.  It fails to address the UN’s history of bias, such as disproportionately targeting Israel for human rights violations while ignoring abuses by countries like China and Saudi Arabia.  And it promotes policies which often conflict with US policy positions and potentially bind the US to commitments it cannot keep.

“The Pact for the Future will join a long list of UN declarations that have served as diplomatic and rhetorical cudgels with which to attack the United States. The prudent path for the US would be not to support the Pact for the Future in the upcoming Summit,” Schaefer advised.

Schaefer also notes that the Pact grants excessive authority to the UN and questions why national governments would hand over this authority.  “It is clear why the Secretary-General would have an interest in bolstering the power and influence of the United Nations. It is far less clear why governments would be so inclined given the organisation’s failure to address the very responsibilities that the Pact would charge it with resolving,” he said.

He concedes that some of the concerns in the Pact have merit and need to be addressed, some multilaterally.  “But the Pact focuses myopically on the UN as the sole, best solution.”

According to the Secretary-General, “Enhanced international cooperation is the only way we can adequately respond to these shocks, and the United Nations is the only organisation with the reach and legitimacy to convene at the highest level and galvanise global action.”

However, the UN’s history and recent events cast serious doubts regarding the organisation’s ability to respond effectively to Antonia Guterres’ concerns.  Schaefer identifies some of the UN’s ineffectiveness:

• the UN is increasingly gridlocked due to the opposing interests of its veto-wielding members;
• in some instances, the Pact is a solution in search of a problem;
• in other instances, the Pact seeks to double down on ill-conceived efforts like the Sustainable Development Goals; and,
• the Pact also jabs at the US by including a commitment to finance the UN budgets “in full, on time and without conditions.”

However, the most egregious problem with the Pact is its failure to grapple with the fact that the UN has not fulfilled the purposes outlined in the UN Charter for the simple reason that most member states themselves oppose them.  Schaefer briefly describes the most glaring failures of the UN:

• human rights bias;
• peacekeeping failures; and,
• undefined terrorism.

Human Rights Bias

Schaefer points out that the Pact reiterates the need for UN human rights mechanisms to act with “impartiality, objectivity and non-selectivity.”  Yet the UN violates this impartiality with regularity. The most obvious example of bias is the UN’s targeting of Israel for human rights violations while failing to condemn China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia for human rights violations.

Not only does the UN show bias but its own human rights record is questionable.  As well as the composition of the Human Rights Council, Schaefer points out Guterres’ stance on freedom of expression. 

“[Guterres’] partiality to restrictions on freedom of expression is well established and is reflected in the Pact,” Shaefer said. 

In the Pact, economic, social, and cultural rights are given preference over civil and political rights.  And the right to freedom of expression is specifically under assault;  the Pact calls on states to address “the risks to sustaining peace posed by disinformation, misinformation, hate speech and content inciting harm, including content disseminated through digital platforms.”

“The definitions of misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and harmful content are highly subjective and are frequently used for political purposes as illustrated by the UN and individual governments during the covid-19 pandemic,” Schaefer said.

Peacekeeping Failure

The UN’s peacekeeping efforts have a mixed record.  While there have been successful operations, such as those in the Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire) and Liberia, there have been disasters in places like Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti and South Sudan.

And in Lebanon, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (“UNIFIL”) operation allows Hezbollah to arm and launch attacks from an area that is supposed to be disarmed except for UN and Lebanese armed forces.

“Then there are disturbing, repeated incidences of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN peacekeepers, disastrous missteps like the introduction of cholera to Haiti, and failures to protect civilians even in the face of genocide,” Shaefer wrote.

Undefined Terrorism

Even though the Pact condemns terrorism, the UN has never been able to agree on a definition of terrorism, which begs the question of how it proposes to fight something that it cannot identify.

UN officials often condemn specific acts as terrorism, but these condemnations and categorisations of terrorism by the UN are inconsistent and politicised, Schaefer notes and gives the example of Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the largest and most dangerous terrorist organisations, which are not listed as such by the UN, and their acts of terrorism are enabled by some UN member states.

Climate Scaremongering

The Pact commits member states to enhance addressing of climate change by adopting ambitious emissions reductions.  However, the UN’s climate change agenda is flawed.

The Secretary-General has been traversing the globe issuing dire warnings of the climate change threat claiming that by failing to act, “humanity has opened the gates to hell” and unleashed extreme weather events.  This alarmist rhetoric is not supported by the UN’s own report.

More fundamentally, the UN plan to address this supposed threat of a climate catastrophe is fatally flawed. Even if every nation fully complied with its Paris commitments, the 1.5 degree goal is not achievable according to the UN’s own projections.

“Moreover, drastic steps seem to be at odds with recent projections indicating that extreme climate scenarios are less and less likely under current trends,” Schaefer noted.

US Policy Recommendations

Towards the end of his report, Schaefer provides some policy recommendations for the US government which include the following.

Congress should leverage its power of the purse to oppose the UN Pact for the Future. The Congress is not bound by political statements made by the President. “This includes commitments to climate funding, such as the Paris Agreement, and obligations and commitments within the Sustainable Development Goals and development assistance targets, such as the 0.7 per cent of gross national income that the UN would have developed countries devote to official development assistance,” Schaefer said.

The US should not support or participate in flawed UN human rights bodies. The UN’s human rights mechanisms are swayed by a majority of members who are neither politically nor economically free, leading to disproportionate actions against Israel and the appointment of people representing repressive regimes with questionable records on human rights.

Conclusion

The UN’s fall from grace has been steep, Schaefer said. He continued:

The international response to covid-19, led by the World Health Organisation, was inept and politicised. Treaty negotiations founder on divergent interests and disagreements. Conflicts in Ukraine and between Israel and Iranian proxies in the Middle East reveal the UN’s impotence in addressing serious security crises. Even in Africa, where it historically has exerted significant influence, the UN has proven wanting, unable to address civil wars in Sudan, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. Governments are increasingly asking UN peacekeeping operations to leave.

The Pact for the Future is an attempt by the Secretary-General to restore the UN to prominence and centrality in world affairs. He should instead be calling for reassessment, retrenchment and refocus.

The US Must Oppose the UN Pact for the Future by Brett Schaefer, The Heritage Foundation, 16 September 2024

The above are some highlights from the report ‘The US Must Oppose the UN Pact for the Future’ written by Brett D. Schaefer, the Jay Kingham Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs in the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation.  We cannot hope to summarise his report and do it justice. It is worthwhile setting aside the required 30 minutes and reading it in full. You can read Schaefer’s report HERE.