Category: UN INSIDER

Viewpoint by Erlan Idrissov | Reproduced courtesy of The Hill

The author is Foreign Minister Kazakhstan. This article originally appeared with the headline High time for Central Asia and Kazakhstan to have a voice in UN Security Council.

ASTANA – No organisation has a greater global responsibility than the United Nations Security Council. The Council has the solemn task of maintaining international peace with the power to intervene if threats put it or the safety of civilian populations at risk. Its effectiveness has a huge impact on our world and the lives of millions of people.

The Council’s authority stems from the UN Charter and the support of the international community. But it is strengthened when its membership is as representative as possible. Its decisions, too, benefit when drawing on differing global perspectives. It is why from the beginning, the Council’s membership included not just the great powers but a rotating group of countries elected on a regional basis.

Analysis by Franz Baumann *

NEW YORK – Three months before his tragic death, Dag Hammarskjöld gave a powerful lecture in Oxford, entitled The International Civil Servant in Law and in Fact. He positioned the Secretary-General’s role and that of the Secretariat in the architecture of the United Nations.

Hammarskjöld implicitly built on the conclusions formulated by the great U.S. political scientist Inis L. Claude in his classic 1956 study Swords Into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, namely that there are two United Nations: firstly the arena of member states, secondly the Secretariat.

NEW YORK – United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has commended a joint statement on climate change made by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and United States President Barack Obama announcing their support for early entry into force of the Paris Agreement, and encouraged all countries to accelerate their domestic processes to join or ratify it.

“The Secretary-General welcomes the domestic steps being undertaken by both countries to join the Paris Agreement as soon as possible, including in 2016, and their collaborative efforts to address climate change,” indicated a statement issued by Ban’s spokesperson on June 8.

Analysis by J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – The United Nations has been spending billions on assisting in navigating the difficult path from conflict to peace in different parts of the world. But with little or no success on the whole, as senior officials of the world body admit.

“Success is never guaranteed, because UN Peacekeeping almost by definition goes to the most physically and politically difficult environments. However, we have built up a demonstrable record of success over our 60 years of existence, including winning the Nobel Peace Prize,” says United Nations Peacekeeping.

By J Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – UN Women, United Nations organization dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, has drawn attention to three “historic firsts” achieved this year in combatting sexual violence in conflict. At the same time, the organisation’s Deputy Executive Director Lakshmi Puri has stressed that “realizing gender equality has a deadline, and it is 2030”.

In run-up to the first International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict on June 19, UN Women said all three historic firsts were “long overdue and all had one thing in common: the unstoppable force of women’s voice and leadership”.

By Jaya Ramachandran

BRUSSELS (IDN) – Over 1.2 billion people – one in five of the world’s population – do not have access to electricity. The majority are concentrated in about a dozen countries in Africa and Asia. Another 2.8 billion rely on wood, charcoal, dung and coal for cooking and heating, which results in over four million premature deaths a year due to indoor air pollution.

Without electricity, women and girls have to spend hours fetching water, clinics cannot store vaccines for children, many schoolchildren cannot do homework at night, and people cannot run competitive businesses.

Analysis By J. Nastranis

NEW YORK (IDN) – Fiji’s man at the UN, who has been elected as President of the 71st of Session the General Assembly in “a rare secret ballot”, plans to be particularly vocal on the issue of climate change.

It is the first time that a representative of a Pacific small island developing State will serve as head of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which is the main deliberative, policymaking and representative organ of the world body.

The selection of its President follows a geographical rotation system, with respective regional groups putting forward a consensus candidate each year. In this case Asia-Pacific States could not reach consensus on a single nominee.

Subsequently, on June 13, Peter Thomson was pitted against Andreas Mavroyiannis of Cyprus, who was defeated by a secret-ballot vote of 94 to 90, with one abstention.

GENEVA – With a multitude of conflicts and crises causing record displacement around the world, more than 1.19 million people are projected to be in need of resettlement in 2017, the UN refugee agency said on June 13.

According to the Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2017, released June 13 by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva, more than one million refugees were submitted by the agency to over 30 resettlement countries in the past decade, and the number of people in need of resettlement far surpasses the opportunities for placement in a third country.

The number of people in need of resettlement in 2017 will likely surpass 1.19 million, up 72 per cent on the projected needs of 691,000 in 2014, before large-scale resettlement of Syrians began.

Analysis by Reinhardt Jacobsen

BRUSSELS (IDN) – As border clashes between Eritrea and Ethiopia continued into the second day on June 13, observers recalled UN Secretary-General’s remarks in January 2008 that he was “worried about the growing militarization, on both side(s) of the boarder, which could lead to a war”.

That concern is shared by civil society organisations in the two countries. They are warning that the border clahses that triggered on June 12 in the Tsorona area on the border of Ethiopia and Eritrea “can easily escalate into full-blown war”.

While calling for an end to fighting, the civil society organisations are urging the African Union to step in with its peace and Security Council; and the European Union and the United States to step in as witnesses to a peace process.

Analysis by Ramesh Jaura

BERLIN (IDN) – While campaigners for a world free of nuclear weapons are confident that “a ban is coming”, the annual nuclear forces data launched by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on June 13 gives little hope for optimism.

“Despite the ongoing reduction in the number of weapons, the prospects for genuine progress towards nuclear disarmament remain gloomy,” says Shannon Kile, Head of the SIPRI Nuclear Weapons Project. “All the nuclear weapon-possessing states continue to prioritize nuclear deterrence as the cornerstone of their national security strategies.”

But for the Geneva-based International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), “it is now clear beyond doubt that an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations are ready to start negotiations on a treaty banning nuclear weapons”. By putting in place a ban, they hope to stimulate much-needed progress towards the total elimination of nuclear forces.