Diplomats at the United Nations finally reached agreement on Tuesday night on a watered-down document to reform the organisation and tackle poverty just hours before leaders arrived for the start of a world summit.
This final draft, to be presented to the leaders for publication on Friday, fell far short of ambitious proposals for an overhaul of the UN which was set out earlier this year by Kofi Annan, the Secretary General.
Development campaigners expressed disappointment at the lack of progress on aid, debt and, particularly, trade. Ambassadors at the UN, who have been engaged in tortuous negotiations for weeks, made one final push on Tuesday to find consensus but soon abandoned the attempt.
Instead, Jean Ping, Gabon’s ambassador to the UN and president of the general assembly, unilaterally removed all the remaining points of contention, leaving in place a bland final draft. It is far removed from the original plan to reform the UN to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The general assembly voted in favour of the final draft, which is unlikely to be changed between now and Friday.
About 149 leaders are scheduled to attend the summit, which would make it the biggest-ever world gathering to date. The general assembly will be addressed by United States President George Bush on Wednesday morning, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Wednesday evening.
Campaigners and diplomats who favoured a bold approach put much of the blame for the failure on John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN, who introduced hundreds of late changes to the original document.
Bolton said he was pleased with the final draft: ”This is not the alpha and omega and we never thought it would be.”
The US ambassador, who had argued that UN reform was too important to be done in a rush, said: ”It was only ever going to be the first step.”
Oxfam described the development section of the final draft as a ”recycling of old pledges”. Save the Children said the chance of a historic breakthrough on poverty ”had all but slipped through the fingers of world leaders”.
The final draft document shows progress has been made during negotiations on intervention to prevent genocide, but limited progress on the creation of two UN bodies, a human rights council and a peace-building commission. There is no new money for aid or debt relief, and the language on fair trade has been weakened.
Nor has there been movement on climate change, arms proliferation or expansion of the security council.
The negotiations have been caught in a squeeze between Bolton, and a group of countries that one diplomat referred to as ”the awkward squad”, which includes Pakistan, Egypt, Sudan, the Palestinian Authority, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela.
Blair, who will meet Bush this morning, is worried that progress made at the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July on aid and debt may end up being reversed.
Blair believes elections in Germany and Japan, together with the impact of Hurricane Katrina in the US, may make it more difficult to persuade G8 members to make good on their promises and to widen the Gleneagles agreement to other rich countries.
Although some development campaigners have criticised the government for exaggerating the success of the Gleneagles deal, Blair believes he pushed the G8 as far as possible. A Downing Street source said: ”We always said Gleneagles was just a beginning and it is going to take quite a fight to build on it. There is the risk of a backlash.” – Guardian Unlimited Â
