A rchive Date
[ 19-02-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.N ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_london.html
UN future rests in protecting human rights
By SALIM MANSUR - For the London Free Press
February 19, 2003
The 2003 Valentine Day session of the Security Council is headed into history books as a defining moment for the United Nations and the shape of the future world order.
There was high drama as foreign ministers of the Security Council's five permanent members took their seats to hear the reports of Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei on Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions. It was also great political theatre, as happens in politics during moments of high tension, when everyone senses that what remains unstated is of far greater importance than what is read from prepared scripts.
There is no mistaking that the UN has now arrived at its much anticipated crossroads, postponed since the end of the Cold War, and a decision made by the Security Council to support or deny the use of force against Saddam Hussein's regime will have profound consequences for an organization conceived in the darkest days of the war against Hitlerism, fascism and militarism nearly 62 years ago.
During the nearly five decades of the Cold War, the delicately balanced twin principles of the freedom of people and the rights of states (referred to as "nations"), as the preamble of the UN charter proclaims, became greatly tilted in favour of the rights of states at the expense of the freedom of people.
Hence, with the disintegration of the former Soviet Union that brought freedom to the peoples of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the issue surrounding the search for reconstituting a "new world order" - a phrase used by former president George H. W. Bush during and after the Gulf War of 1991 - meant reviving once again the dormant principle of the charter, the freedom of the people, suppressed by great powers due to the requirements of the Cold War.
The road to the founding of the UN at the San Francisco conference in April 1945 originated at a secret meeting in August 1941, of U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and the British prime minister Winston Churchill, when they issued a joint declaration known as the Atlantic Charter. Both leaders pledged themselves to working for a more secure world after defeating Nazism and their declaration incorporated Roosevelt's message sent to the U.S. Congress in January 1941 to make the world safe for "four freedoms" - freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Historians will point out how the Atlantic Charter was the hinge between the liberal internationalism of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, embedded in his Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, calling for an end to the war in Europe, and the UN charter.
The UN charter drew lessons from the terrible carnage of the two world wars and the failure of the League of Nations. The charter, in particular its preamble, needs to be read carefully, keeping in mind the context in which it was drafted and adopted at the San Francisco conference.
The second clause of the preamble reads, "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small . . . ." In drafting this clause, the authors deliberately placed the freedom of people - referred to as fundamental human rights - ahead of the rights of states and simultaneously emphasized the core principle of liberal democracy they cherished.
The UN was not conceived as the instrument it became during the Cold War years, by which rights of states, irrespective of how tyrannical some states might be, as is Saddam's Iraq, trump the freedom of people.
This is the principle at stake, though unstated, in the debate surrounding the use of force to bring regime change in Iraq, as it was in the Balkans.
The continuing UN failure to protect the freedom of people since the Cold War's end will inevitably mean its increasing irrelevance, and sadly meeting the fate of the League of Nations due to that body's repeated failure to enforce collective security measures against aggressor states.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays. Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@lfpress.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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