The Indian Panorama

Tag: Asoke Mukerji

  • Need to review UN Charter to reflect change

    Need to review UN Charter to reflect change

    The first step towards strengthening the multilateral system must, therefore, begin with removing the contradictions within the UN Charter on decision-making

    “As the UN prepares to mark its 80th anniversary in September 2025, it is time to prioritize coordinated action to convene a UN General Conference to review and strengthen the Charter, as committed by the UN’s Summit of the Future. Such a “rule of law”-based initiative must be taken by countries that have publicly committed to “reform multilateralism”, including India. Only then can the ongoing crisis in multilateralism be effectively overcome.”

    By Asoke Mukerji

    As we mark UN Charter Day today (October 24), it is important to acknowledge that Agenda 2030 on sustainable development represents the most significant ground-level achievement of the UN since 1945, giving it a “human face”. Anchored in Article 1 and Chapter IX of the UN Charter, which advocate the mutual benefits of international socio-economic cooperation, Agenda 2030’s derailment due to violent conflicts extracts a massive toll on humanity. In 2022, the UN Secretary-General reported that the number of people adversely impacted by conflicts worldwide exceeded 2 billion.

    The UN Summit of the Future held in September 2024 characterized Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the “central objective of multilateralism” and called for strengthening the UN Charter to “keep pace with the changing world”.

    However, the summit adopted a “Pact for the Future” predominantly to reiterate the agreed commitments on Agenda 2030, without proposing any time-bound process for reviewing and strengthening the Charter. The consequent ambiguity for the future of multilateralism bodes ill for “we the peoples”, in whose name the UN Charter was adopted in June 1945 “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”.

    An effective response to the crisis facing multilateralism must be formulated within the framework and provisions of the UN Charter by the UN General Assembly (UNGA). As a legal treaty, the Charter balances mutually agreed principles and objectives with specific provisions regulating different aspects of multilateral governance. The UN’s second Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, famously remarked in 1956 that the purposes of the UN Charter are “expressions of universally shared ideals which cannot fail us, though we, alas, often fail them”.

    Article 24 of the Charter puts the “primary responsibility” for maintaining international peace and security on the UNSC. The track record of the UNSC’s failure in recent years to fulfil its responsibility is well documented. It failed to provide political leadership to the UN’s fractured response to the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It has compromised on countering terrorism by adopting double standards based on the political agendas of its permanent members. Its inability to resolve conflicts globally has undermined national efforts of UN member-states to implement Agenda 2030 in an increasingly polarized, confrontational and unpredictable world.

    Aggravating its acts of omission, the UNSC has been unable to enforce its own unanimous decisions, denting the declared objectives of the SDGs. The highly publicized human suffering and destruction in recent years in Afghanistan (despite UNSC Resolution 2513 of March 2020), West Asia (despite UNSC Resolution 242 of November 1967), and Ukraine (despite UNSC Resolution 2202 of February 2015), are only a few examples of the inability of the UNSC to lead the way to sustainable peace.

    Prima facie, the UNSC should not be in such a situation. Article 25 of the Charter makes the UNSC decisions legally binding obligations for all UN member-states. The UNSC is given powers to impose economic sanctions under Article 41 and use armed force under Article 42 of the Charter to enforce its decisions. Any attempt by the UNGA to assert predominance on issues of peace and security are restricted by Article 12 of the Charter, which prevents the UNGA from making any recommendation on any dispute or situation on the UNSC’s agenda unless requested to do so by the UNSC, while Article 10 of the Charter makes the UNGA recommendations voluntary, not mandatory like the UNSC decisions.

    The crisis in multilateralism is due to the biggest anomaly of the UN Charter, which is the coexistence of two contradictory processes of decision-making within one treaty. Article 18 of the Charter upholds the democratic principle of sovereign equality in decision-making in the UNGA on the basis of one-country one-vote, providing for decisions being taken by consensus or by a majority vote if there is no consensus. Article 27.3 of the Charter, on the other hand, gives a dictatorial power of “veto” to China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States as the five permanent members (P5) of the UNSC, allowing them to override without any explanation decisions proposed by each other, or by any of the 10 democratically elected non-permanent members of the UNSC representing the world’s geographical regions.

    The consequence is that while the vast majority of the UNGA membership may have firm views and proposals on how to respond to the growing political fragmentation of the multilateral system, only the UNSC can take decisions that oblige members of the UNGA under the Charter to uphold international peace and security. The first step towards strengthening the multilateral system must, therefore, begin with removing the contradictions within the Charter on decision-making.

    The Charter contains an agreed framework in Article 109 for reviewing the provisions of the treaty. This was highlighted by Sir A Ramaswamy Mudaliar, who signed the Charter on behalf of India, in his first statement to the UNGA on January 18, 1946. He said that the veto had not been acceptable to “many nations”, including India, and should be reviewed after 10 years, as referred to in Article 109. The UN’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism recommended in 2023 to the Summit of the Future a “Charter Review Conference” to focus on the UNSC reform. Yet, so far, there has been no public discussion within the UNGA or the UNSC on implementing the review clause of Article 109 by convening a General Conference of the UN.

    As the UN prepares to mark its 80th anniversary in September 2025, it is time to prioritize coordinated action to convene a UN General Conference to review and strengthen the Charter, as committed by the UN’s Summit of the Future. Such a “rule of law”-based initiative must be taken by countries that have publicly committed to “reform multilateralism”, including India. Only then can the ongoing crisis in multilateralism be effectively overcome.
    (The author is a retired Diplomat and a Distinguished Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF). He can be reached at 1955pram@gmail.com)

  • Reforming UN for a rules-based order

    Reforming UN for a rules-based order

    Primary reason for the ongoing crises in Ukraine and Gaza is an ineffective Security Council

    The need to urgently reform the rules-based order has to be pursued through informal multiple-stakeholder consultations in the lead-up to the UN’s Summit of the Future, due in September. Using dialogue and diplomacy to convene a General Conference of the UN in 2025, the objective should be to give the ‘primary responsibility’ for peace, security and development to the equitable and representative UNGA.

    “The UNSC’s decisions since 1946 have been consistently taken in the light of geopolitical priorities of its P5 members and not any commitment to world peace. This was the pattern during the ideological confrontation of the Cold War (1946-1991). After the Cold War, the three NATO members of the P5 (France, the UK and US) acted to make the NATO supplant the UNSC, symbolized by their action in Libya in 2011. The UNSC subsequently proved helpless in preventing NATO’s weaponization of globalized economic linkages through unilateral sanctions, which have primarily affected developing countries. The outcome has been the intensification of armed conflicts, impacting not only the integrity of the UNSC but also more than two billion people mainly in the Global South, according to the UN.”

    By Asoke Mukerji

    The breakdown of the ‘rules-based order’ is evident from the spread of violent conflicts that are fracturing international relations. At the heart of this order is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), which is mandated by the UN Charter with the ‘primary responsibility’ of maintaining international peace and security. The Charter stipulates that UNSC decisions are binding on all UN member-states. The widening gap between decision-making by the UNSC and the challenges to peace, security and development on the ground is directly responsible for the ongoing crises. The priority for the international community is to eliminate this gap through a review and reform of the rules-based order. This can only be done through the UN General Assembly (UNGA), in which all states, big and small, are represented on an equal basis.

    Now, 20 million Afghan women live under ‘gender apartheid’. The UNSC was unable to ensure compliance with its decision of 2015, guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

    The UNSC’s decision-making parameters were negotiated between August 1944 and February 1945 among the Council’s five ‘permanent’ members or the P5 (today’s Russia, China, France, the UK and the US). A key feature was the requirement for the ‘concurrence’ (popularly known as the veto) of the P5 to UNSC decisions. Both the composition of the P5 and their veto power were ‘parachuted’ into the UN Charter as non-negotiable pre-conditions in the invitation extended to countries for participating in the San Francisco conference (April-June 1945) to adopt the Charter. During the conference, some countries objected to the non-democratic veto provision. Addressing the first session of the UNGA on January 18, 1946, India said it had agreed to the consensus on the Charter on the basis of a compromise. The compromise, contained in Article 109 of the Charter, was to convene a UN General Conference to review the Charter’s provisions 10 years after it was adopted. So far, such a General Conference has not taken place.

    The UNSC’s decisions since 1946 have been consistently taken in the light of geopolitical priorities of its P5 members and not any commitment to world peace. This was the pattern during the ideological confrontation of the Cold War (1946-1991). After the Cold War, the three NATO members of the P5 (France, the UK and US) acted to make the NATO supplant the UNSC, symbolized by their action in Libya in 2011. The UNSC subsequently proved helpless in preventing NATO’s weaponization of globalized economic linkages through unilateral sanctions, which have primarily affected developing countries. The outcome has been the intensification of armed conflicts, impacting not only the integrity of the UNSC but also more than two billion people mainly in the Global South, according to the UN.

    The recent track record of the UNSC in failing to uphold a rules-based order illustrates the urgent need for reforming its mandated role. On August 15, 2021, the UNSC was unable to enforce compliance with its own unanimous decision of March 10, 2020, linking US/NATO troop withdrawal with a politically inclusive government in Afghanistan. Today, 20 million Afghan women live under ‘gender apartheid’. On February 22, 2022, the UNSC was unable to ensure compliance with its decision of February 17, 2015, guaranteeing Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty in return for the devolution of political power to its restive eastern regions under the Minsk Agreements. The resulting violent conflict between Russia and Ukraine (which is supported externally by NATO) has ruined millions of lives physically and socio-economically. On October 7, 2023, the UNSC was unable to make member-states comply with its numerous resolutions, including No. 2334 of December 23, 2016, on the Israel-Palestine issue. The conflict has led to the death of thousands of women and children.

    In an ideal rules-based order, the UNGA should be responsible under the Charter for maintaining international peace and security. Since 2015, all UN member-states, including the P5, have accepted the interlinkage between peace, security and development. However, the Charter was deliberately drafted to make UNGA decisions recommendatory and non-binding on UN member-states. It prevents the UNGA from considering issues that are on the agenda of the UNSC. Even a UNGA decision to amend the Charter (and reform the UNSC) is hostage to a P5 veto under Article 108 of the Charter. The cart is put before the horse.

    The UNGA has tried to overcome these handicaps by prioritizing its work mandating negotiations of treaties to create a rules-based order. Such treaties include the Convention on Genocide (1948); the Convention on outlawing Racial Discrimination (1965); the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966); the Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979); the Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982); and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Participating states are expected to uphold their treaty obligations to achieve the principles and objectives of the Charter.

    A similar approach marks UNGA decisions recommending norms for member-states to use in adopting national legislation. The first such document, adopted unanimously by the UNGA on December 10, 1948, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On September 25, 2015, the UNGA adopted Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development with its 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), the first universally applicable normative global policy framework interlinking peace, security, development and environmental protection.

    The assertion by world leaders at the UN SDG Summit on September 18-19, 2023, that numerous crises had put the implementation of the SDGs into peril deserves to be taken seriously. The primary reason for these crises is an ineffective UNSC, whose unanimously mandated reform has been assiduously blocked in informal UNGA negotiations by the P5 since 2008.

    The need to urgently reform the rules-based order has to be pursued through informal multiple-stakeholder consultations in the lead-up to the UN’s Summit of the Future, due in September. Using dialogue and diplomacy to convene a General Conference of the UN in 2025, the objective should be to give the ‘primary responsibility’ for peace, security and development to the equitable and representative UNGA.
    (The author is a former Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations)

  • The G-20 Summit in India

    The G-20 Summit in India

    The 18th G20 Heads of State and Government Summit in New Delhi will be a culmination of all the G20 processes and meetings held throughout the year among ministers, senior officials, and civil societies.

    By Asoke Mukerji

    On 1 December 2022, India assumed the Presidency of the Group of 20 (G-20). The G-20 represents 19 major economies and the European Union, comprising 85% of global GDP, over 75% of global trade, and about two-thirds of the global population. The theme of India’s G-20 Presidency is “One Earth, One Family, One Future”, also encapsulated in Sanskrit by the phrase Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. India’s holistic interdependent approach to global issues emphasizes effective and equitable global cooperation. By the time the G-20 Summit is held in India on 9-10 September 2023, about 200 meetings of the G-20 would have been hosted in over 50 cities in India to carry forward the G-20 workplan across 32 different workstreams. This provides a large canvas for global cooperation. India’s six declared priorities as the G-20 President are: climate change including climate action; inclusive and resilient growth; acceleration of progress on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); technological transformation and digital public infrastructure; women-led development; and reformed multilateralism.

    India’s endeavour is to make G-20 activities “human-centric”, with G-20 meetings held in India so far emphasising the participation of all relevant stakeholders, including large numbers of youth. The G-20 Bali Summit held in November 2022 reiterated that the G-20 remains “the premier forum for global economic cooperation”. India’s Presidency of the G-20 has consciously focused on greater global cooperation within this economic framework.

    The main challenges for global cooperation today come from the impact of armed conflicts and unprecedented disruptions like the Covid-19 pandemic on socio-economic development. Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at eradicating poverty represents the only universal framework for global socio-economic development. Two statistics illustrate the current grave human-centric dimension of the challenges facing Agenda 2030.

    According to the UN, about 60 million people world-wide were victims of armed conflicts when Agenda 2030 was adopted unanimously in September 2015. By 2022, that figure has risen sharply to 324 million people. In 2015, according to the World Bank, about 700 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, were living below the poverty line. By 2022, about 685 people across the world were below the poverty line, with as many as 150 million, mainly in developing countries, pulled below the poverty line by the Covid-19 pandemic.

    In response, the priority for India’s G-20 Presidency has been to revive the momentum of global cooperation needed to achieve Agenda 2030 by its deadline of 31 December 2030. The identified SDGs subsume the six priorities identified by India during its Presidency. In the six areas that India has identified as its priorities, national initiatives taken by India have been shared with other G-20 countries, especially developing countries. India’s credentials for pushing greater global cooperation within the G-20 has strong foundations.

    Climate Change: The Climate Change pillar has been influenced significantly by India’s initiative to champion Climate Action. Two landmark proposals are adapting global Lifestyles for Environment (LiFE) and using renewable solar energy for development. A new multilateral intergovernmental organization based in India, the International Solar Alliance (ISA), has about 120 countries. The ISA aims to mobilize US$ 1,000 billion in investments in solar energy solutions by 2030, delivering energy access to 1,000 million people using clean energy solutions and resulting in the installation of 1,000 GW of solar energy capacity. During its G-20 Presidency, India has focused on the need for G-20 developed country members to contribute both financially and through non-restrictive transfers of environmentally friendly technologies to enhance the national capacities of developing countries to meet global environmental targets.

    Inclusive Growth: India’s flagship initiative for a global Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) made at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit anchors the growing emphasis within the G-20 on the need to sustain economic growth and build resilient supply chains, particularly after the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of natural disasters attributed to climate change. By developing standards and regulations to make infrastructure resilient in confronting disaster and climate risks, the CDRI seeks to expand a multiple stakeholder approach to sustain growth through a two-way knowledge transfer between developed and developing countries.

    Sustainable Development: To assist developing countries to meet their national targets to implement Agenda 2030 and its SDGs, India and the UN created the India-UN Development Partnership Fund in 2017. With committed financial support of $150 million from India, the Fund has prioritized development projects in least-developed countries, landlocked-developing countries, and small island developing states. So far, 36 projects in 37 partner countries have been processed by the Fund.

    Technological Transformation: India’s successful experience in using digital technologies for governance and empowerment to accelerate development through a “whole of society” approach has made it a credible thought-leader in this area during its G-20 Presidency. In partnership with the UNDP, India has hosted a series of G-20 discussions to position India as a global hub for using open and interoperable standards to create a human-centric digital public infrastructure with lower implementation costs, especially for developing countries.

    Women’s Empowerment: India has prioritized women’s digital and financial inclusion through the use of digital technology. The current focus of G-20 meetings being held in India in this sphere includes effective outreach on education for women, greater participation by women in the workforce, larger representation of women in leadership positions, and the continued narrowing of the identified gaps on gender equality.

    Reformed Multilateralism: The Preamble of Agenda 2030 underscored that “there can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development”. India has taken the lead to implement this by pointing out that “this is not an era of war.” However, the ineffectiveness of existing multilateral institutions to ensure peace, security and development has highlighted calls for “reformed multilateralism.” The G-20 will need to give a major push to reform multilateral institutions like the UN and its Security Council, responsible under the UN Charter for maintaining international peace and security (where reforms mandated unanimously by world leaders in 2005 continue to be blocked by the five permanent members of the Security Council); the International Monetary Fund/World Bank, mandated by their Articles of Agreement to ensure global financial coordination for international reconstruction and development (where IMF quota and governance reforms agreed to in 2010 remain unimplemented till now due to delaying tactics by developed countries); and the World Trade Organization, created to ensure the primacy of multilaterally agreed trade rules based on non-discrimination (where reforms to enhance the organization’s integrity and effectiveness are being exploited since 2016 by the growing recourse of developed countries to unilateralism and protectionism).

    When India assumed the Presidency of the G-20 at the November 2022 Bali Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that India’s “G-20 priorities will be shaped in consultation with not just our G-20 partners, but also our fellow-travellers in the Global South, whose voice often goes unheard.” On 12-13 January 2023, India hosted a virtual “Voice of the Global South for Human-centric Development” Summit. A measure of the importance of India’s initiative can be gauged from the fact that 125 countries responded to this initiative, including 47 from Africa, 31 from Asia, 29 from Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 from Oceania, and 7 from Europe. On 27 March 2023, developing countries in the UN voted overwhelmingly to adopt a resolution opposing unilateral sanctions due to their “extra-territorial” nature and adverse impact on the “right to development”.

    The deliberations of the G-20 under India’s Presidency will be carried forward through two processes. Within the G-20, three major developing countries (India, Brazil, and South Africa) will lead the G-20 during 2023-2025 creating a three-year window for implementing the priorities of the Global South. Outside the G-20, ongoing processes for enhancing international cooperation will come to a head with the UN’s SDG Summit in September 2023, followed by the UN’s Summit of the Future in 2024. These Summits are expected to result in the call for a General Conference to review the UN Charter, as recommended in April 2023 by the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, to coincide with the UN’s 80th anniversary Summit in 2025. This represents a golden opportunity for India’s G-20 Presidency in consolidating a “human-centric” sustainable development paradigm, which will restore popular support for the principle of international cooperation upholding the functioning of the “world as one family”.

    (The author, a retired IFS officer, was Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations in New York between 2013-2015)

  • India at the United Nations during the last 75 years

    By Asoke Mukerji

    The accepted interlinkage between peace, security, and development in Agenda 2030 is now the framework for India’s call for “reformed multilateralism”, which seeks to make the UN responsive and effective in implementing Agenda 2030. At the heart of “reformed multilateralism” is the reform of the UNSC.

    The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s recent report titled “”Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021”, gives a worrying overall picture of the main preoccupation of the UN today, which is the implementation of Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development by ensuring a supportive environment of peace, security, and development.

    The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres released a significant report recently. titled “”Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021″, it gives a worrying overall picture of the main preoccupation of the UN today, which is the implementation of Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development by ensuring a supportive environment of peace, security, and development. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has been especially harsh on some of the objectives of the UN’s Agenda 2030 on sustainable development, the overarching objective of which is the eradication of poverty worldwide by 2030. Since the 1972 first UN Conference on the Environment, India has steadfastly pursued this objective through the UN, based on her vision that “poverty is the biggest polluter”.

    This Report is important for India. When India joined 50 other countries 76 years ago in June 1945 to negotiate and establish the UN, her primary concern was how the UN would support her rapid socio-economic transformation. The Cold War, launched on 5 March 1946 with British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill’s seminal “Iron Curtain” speech at Fulton, Missouri in the United States, augured ill for a consolidated process within the UN to enable this objective, dividing the unity of the original founding members of the UN.

    “We cannot eat an ideology; we cannot brandish an ideology and feel that we are clothed and housed…”, said Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the leader of Independent India’s delegation to the UN General Assembly said on 17 September 1947.

    As Vijayalakshmi Pandit, the leader of Independent India’s delegation to the UN General Assembly said on 17 September 1947, “We cannot eat an ideology; we cannot brandish an ideology and feel that we are clothed and housed. Food, clothing, shelter, education, medical services‐these are the things we need. We know that we can only obtain them by our joint efforts as a people, and with the help and co‐ operation of those who are in more fortunate circumstances than ourselves.”

    The role of India in spearheading the historic movement to democratize international relations by seeking equal participation of all its member-states is widely acknowledged. This enabled the UN to unanimously adopt its Decolonization Resolution in December 1960. Scores of newly independent former colonial countries joined the UN General Assembly without their applications to join being vetoed by the permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC).

    In retrospect, the significance of the Decolonization Resolution lies in consolidating the formation of the Group of 77 (G-77) developing country grouping in 1964 (of which India was the first Chairman). The UN General Assembly created the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in 1965 to catalyze the demands of the G-77 for accelerated socio-economic development. Today, the G-77 consists of 134 members out of the 193 member-states represented in the UN General Assembly.

    The convergence of the socio-economic development goals of the UN with the priority for environmental protection resulted in the mandate for sustainable development given by the UN’s 1992 “Earth Summit” held in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. This was the first watershed moment for reorienting the UN after the end of the Cold War in 1989. India joined other developing countries in discussing and negotiating the contours of sustainable development, which were adopted by the 2012 Summit held again at Rio de Janeiro and became the mandate for Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development adopted by world leaders (including Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India) in September 2015.

    The accepted interlinkage between peace, security, and development in Agenda 2030 is now the framework for India’s call for “reformed multilateralism”, which seeks to make the UN responsive and effective in implementing Agenda 2030. At the heart of “reformed multilateralism” is the reform of the UNSC. In 2005, world leaders (including those representing all the five permanent members of the UNSC or P5) had agreed to UNSC reform to “make it more broadly representative, efficient and transparent and thus to further enhance its effectiveness and the legitimacy and implementation of its decisions”.

    At the very first session of the UN General Assembly on 18 January 1946, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, representing India, had said that India, along with several other UN member-states, had opposed the provision of the veto power of the five self-selected P5 of the UN Security Council. However, the clear commitment in the Charter itself was that “at the end of the ten years’ period when we re‐examine the Charter, there will be unanimity again, and that this United Nations Charter will not require all the safeguards which big nations sometimes claim and small nations so unwillingly give.”

    This review provision contained in Article 109 of the Charter was never implemented, leading to the ineffectiveness of the UN Security Council and the UN itself. India’s call for “reformed multilateralism” addresses this issue squarely.

    India presides over the Security Council in August2021.India’s permanent representative to the UN T.S. Tirumurti said the Security Councilwill organize meetings focused on key areas of maritime security, peacekeeping and counterterrorism

    How is the issue of UNSC reform relevant to the functioning of the UN today? Leading commentators in the P5 countries continue to advocate persevering with an outdated and increasingly irrelevant UNSC which preserves the status quo of 1945, when the world was dominated by colonial powers. Yet, as the ongoing crises in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America demonstrate, the impact of an ineffective UNSC is felt most directly on the implementation of Agenda 2030 on sustainable development. This represents a “wake-up call” for the UN.

    The UN’s Sustainable Development Report 2021 highlights that between 119-124 million people were pushed back into extreme poverty in 2020 due to the pandemic. An additional 70-161 million people experienced hunger in 2020 due to the pandemic, which has disrupted essential health services globally, aggravating mitigation measures such as universal vaccination. 20 years of educational gains have been wiped out by the pandemic, with an additional 110 million children in grades 1 through 8 falling below minimum reading proficiency levels in 2020. The pandemic has aggravated the burden of unpaid domestic or care work, taking women out of the labor force. It has set back infrastructural development to meet the goals of sanitation and clean water, with 129 countries not on track today to reach this objective by 2030. The pandemic has obstructed 2.6 billion people from moving towards the renewable energy targets of Agenda 2030, while causing a loss of 255 million full-time jobs and impacting on 1.6 billion “informal economy” workers. Exploitation of child labor for the first time in two decades increased to 160 million in 2020. Due to the pandemic global manufacturing production fell by 6.8% in 2020, while the Gini gauge of economic inequality in emerging markets and developing economies increased by 6%. The worst impact of the pandemic has been felt by 1 billion slum dwellers in Asia and Africa. In areas of Agenda 2030 dealing with environmental goals, the picture is equally dire, with global warming on the rise, and increasing threats to endangered species and the degradation of natural resources. Even Foreign Direct Investment dropped by up to 40% from $1.5 trillion in 2019 to $1 trillion in 2020.

    This represents a “wake-up call” for the UN 75 years after its founding in 1945. Unless it urgently responds to the global crisis by reforming itself, the first three words of the UN Charter, “we the peoples,” will remain meaningless.

     The author is a former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations.

    Ambassador Asoke Mukerji served for over 37 years in India’s Foreign Service, retiring in December 2015 as Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the UN in New York. He is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London, and a Distinguished Fellow at India’s oldest think-tank, the United Service Institution (USI) of India and at the Vivekananda International Foundation, New Delhi. Since 2019 he is on the faculty of the Geneva-based Diplo Foundation teaching diplomacy. He was awarded a Doctor of Civil Laws (honoris causa) degree by the University of East Anglia (UK) in July 2018 for his contributions to diplomacy. He has authored 7 books, of which the first copy of “India and the United Nations 1945-2015: a Photo Journey” was presented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in New York in September 2015.

    Ambassador Mukerji can be reached at 1955pram@gmail.com

     

  • Message From Asoke Mukerji

  • Keeping Peace Alive: A Tribute to UN Peacekeepers

    Keeping Peace Alive: A Tribute to UN Peacekeepers

    General Rikhye (left)with UNSG Boutros Ghali in1995. General Rikhye was the first Military Adviser of the UN Secretary General (1960-67) and was instrumental in establishing the International Peace Institute in New York

     

     

                                                            By Ambassador Asoke Kumar Mukerji

    “The human cost of UN peacekeeping has been high. Deployed under the Blue Flag of the United Nations, UN peacekeepers have operated under volatile conditions. However, in recent years, these peacekeepers have themselves become victims of violence, making the supreme sacrifice to safeguard their mandate, and the principles of the UN Charter.”

    “A total of 110,000 UN peacekeepers are currently deployed across the world in 13 missions, funded by a peacekeeping budget of $6.5 billion.”

    “India is justifiably proud of her contributions to UN peacekeeping. She has sent the largest number of troops for UN peacekeeping from among the 193 member-states of the United Nations, with more than 200,000 troops deployed in 49 out of the 71 peacekeeping operations mandated so far by the UNSC.”

    29 May 2020 is being commemorated as the International Day of UN Peacekeepers. It was on this day in 1948 that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) attempted to innovate a mechanism to keep the peace by deploying a small number of UN military observers to monitor the Armistice Agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

    Since then, UN peacekeeping has been used extensively by the UNSC over the past seven decades to provide stability in conflict situations for implementing peace agreements between member-states of the United Nations, and to stabilize conflict situations within the UN’s member-states.

    The human cost of UN peacekeeping has been high. Deployed under the Blue Flag of the United Nations, UN peacekeepers have operated under volatile conditions. However, in recent years, these peacekeepers have themselves become victims of violence, making the supreme sacrifice to safeguard their mandate, and the principles of the UN Charter.

    India is justifiably proud of her contributions to UN peacekeeping. She has sent the largest number of troops for UN peacekeeping from among the 193 member-states of the United Nations, with more than 200,000 troops deployed in 49 out of the 71 peacekeeping operations mandated so far by the UNSC.

    On the International Day of UN Peacekeepers, we remember with respect the supreme sacrifice made by 3925 troops from UN member-states.

    India has suffered the largest number of casualties in UN peacekeeping among the troop-contributing member-states, with 170 fatalities in 25 peacekeeping missions. Of these, as many as 39 Indian UN peacekeepers were killed during their deployment in the Congo as part of ONUC in 1960-64.

    At its 70th anniversary in 2015, the UN convened a Leaders’ Summit on Peacekeeping to take stock of the contribution made by UN peacekeeping to maintaining international peace and security. Addressing the gathering of world leaders, India’s Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi conveyed India’s commitment to participate proactively in implementing the peacekeeping mandates given by the UNSC. He also referred to the UN General Assembly’s unanimous decision to build a Commemorative Wall in honor of the fallen UN peacekeepers from all countries and said “it would be most fitting if the proposed memorial wall to the fallen peacekeepers is created quickly”.

    A total of 110,000 UN peacekeepers are currently deployed across the world in 13 missions, funded by a peacekeeping budget of $6.5 billion. As many as 54,000 troops serve in just four peacekeeping missions in Africa – MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo (annual budget $1.01 billion), UNMISS in South Sudan (annual budget $1.18 billion), MINUSMA in Mali (annual budget $1.13 billion) and MINUSCA in the Central African Republic (annual budget $ 1.2 billion).

    India is a major contributor to two of these four operations, with 1864 troops as part of the 16,215 military personnel deployed on the ground in MONUSCO in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2343 troops on the ground as part of the 13,795 contingent troops in UNMISS in South Sudan.

    The increasing challenges being faced by UN peacekeeping are compounded by the growing resistance of some major powers represented as permanent members in the UNSC to contribute financial resources to sustain UN peacekeeping operations. In April 2019, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had reported that over $250 million were owed to troop contributing countries, among which India was owed $38 million, the highest for any member-state.

    As the United Nations prepares to mark its 75th anniversary later this year, it is time to look to the future of UN peacekeeping. Two issues are relevant in this context.

    First, it is time to augment the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping by enhancing the role played by UN women peacekeepers. 2020 marks the 20th anniversary of the landmark UNSC resolution on “women, peace and security”. India was the first UN member-state to deploy an all-women’s peacekeeping unit in Liberia in 2007. The impact of UN women peacekeepers from India in performing their mandate, as well as acting as force multipliers to sustain the resilience of national governance structures during a period of volatile conflict, has been acknowledged by President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, who was the first elected female head of state in Africa. Building on this experience, India has deployed her women UN peacekeepers as part of UNMISS in South Sudan, where the challenges posed by violent conflict (and their impact on women in particular) are greater.

    Major Suman Gawani of the Indian Army has been given the UN Military Gender Advocate Award for 2020

    It is a fitting tribute to India’s women UN peacekeepers that the UN Military Gender Advocate Award for 2020 has been given to Major Suman Gawani of the Indian Army. The UN highlighted that Major Gawani mentored over 230 UN Military Observers on conflict-related sexual violence and ensured the presence of women military observers in each of UNMISS’ team sites. She also trained South Sudanese government forces.

    The second issue is the long overdue reform of the decision-making process of the UNSC, which decides on the mandates to deploy UN peacekeepers. This reform, mandated by world leaders 15 years ago at the 60th anniversary Summit of the United Nations, must be completed urgently if the UN is to be seen as an effective multilateral institution for maintaining international peace and security. The unprecedented challenges facing the UN today due to the Covid-19 pandemic prioritize the need to break the current deadlock in inter-governmental negotiations in the UN General Assembly. Polarization among the permanent members of the UNSC  and their resistance to UNSC reform cannot be allowed to paralyze or compromise the effectiveness of the Security Council, especially when millions of lives of people caught in conflicts where UN peacekeeping missions are deployed are at stake.

    (The author is a former Indian diplomat and writer. He was Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations from April 2013 to December 2015. He can be reached at 1955pram@gmail.com)