On the right path
Well, most of the world's newspapers have been fairly uniform in their views on the UN's recent summit on reforming that institution - headline after headline describes the summit as a failure, describing the failure of the world's leaders to achieve anything substantive. 'UN meeting falls short of larger goals', says the Globe and Mail. CNN.com aruges that the UN's reform agenda was 'watered down'. All of these statements are true. In many regards, the summit failed. The final summit document did not endorse the creation of a more-powerful Human Rights Council.
The final summit document did not come to an acceptable international definition of terrorism.
The final summit document did not deal with Security Council reform.
But while we need to recognize these failings and work to improve our performance in the future, it is also critical that we recognize the successes that were achieved at the UN summit. U.S. President George W Bush, who has not previously shown very much interest in the longevity of the UN, delivered a speech that demonstrated a new commitment to making the UN work. The summit doubled the budget of the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour, and also committed another $50-billion towards development. The summit supported a Canadian-led notion known as R2P, or the responsibility to protect, the principle that the international community has a responsibility to intervene in situations of genocide or ethnic cleansing. And finally, the summit endorsed the creation of a new Peacebuilding Commission, to help rebuild nation-states recovering from war or insurgency. I rather suspect that Canada will have a large role to play in terms of that new body.
So while it is important to continue to shoot for a bulked-up Human Rights Council, a reformed Security Council, a greater commitment to development and a definition of terrorism, let's not forget that the reforms undertaken at the summit this week are significant, and they are a step in the right direction. At least we're on the right path.
