The United Nations promotes the rule of law around the world, especially in its peacekeeping missions. But while the UN advocates for frameworks through which people, institutions, and nations are held accountable under laws that meet human rights standards, a new study has found that it needs to do more to uphold the rule of law effectively within the organization itself.
What President Obama’s UN Address on Free Speech and Extremism Means for the “Incitement” Debate
It’s a mistake to assume that, because Islam permits individuals to commit violence in response to representations of Muhammad, the filmmaker of “Innocence of Muslims” knew murder might be a consequence.
Caught Red Handed: Rwanda, Violence in Eastern Congo, and the UN Report
The atmosphere was tense during the DRC Briefing at IPS on June 29, 2012. The audience of 45 squeezed into the conference room to hear the updates on Rwanda’s most recent breach of Congolese sovereignty, and the Q & A session threatened to reach a fever pitch.
Big Meetings
Conservative activist Andrew Breitbart, who died earlier this year, created an empire of websites that attack big, fat liberal targets. There’s Big Government, Big Hollywood, and Big Journalism. In 2010, he intervened into foreign policy with his final effort, Big Peace. Not surprisingly, he never got around to launching websites that attacked Big Money or Big Military. Nor did Big Mouth ever appear, for that would have been a wholly uncharacteristic foray into self-criticism.
Blogging the Rio+20 Earth Summit for the Rest of Us: What’s at Stake with the Green Economy
President Barack Obama may be steering clear of the Rio+20 summit, but thousands of government delegates, civil society activists, and business lobbyists are already streaming into Brazil.
Morocco’s Short-Sighted Politics
April of this year marked the 21st anniversary since the UN Security Council accepted responsibility for trying to resolve the Western Sahara conflict through a referendum on self-determination. The referendum has never taken place, nor is it likely to ever happen. Nor, for that matter, is it likely that the conflict will be resolved through the mutually acceptable political solution that the Council has been asking for since April 2004.
Syrian Repression, the Chinese-Russian Veto, and U.S. Hypocrisy
On Saturday, Russia and China vetoed an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the ongoing repression in Syria and calling for a halt to violence on all sides, unfettered access for Arab League monitors, and “a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system, in which citizens are equal regardless of their affiliations or ethnicities or beliefs.”
Although the joint Russian and Chinese veto of the resolution is inexcusable, the self-righteous reaction by U.S. officials betrays hypocrisy on a grand scale and fails to take into account a series of policy blunders that have contributed to the tragic impasse.
UN Origins Project Part 7: Forging a Lasting Peace
After two cataclysmic world wars, the overriding concern for leaders of the day was engineering an international system that would increase state interdependence.
Answering Obama’s UN Address
During the Bush administration, I wrote more than a dozen annotated critiques of presidential speeches. I have refrained from doing so under President Barack Obama, however, because – despite a number of disappointments with his administration’s policies — I found his speeches to be relatively reasonable. Although his September 21 address before the UN General Assembly contained a number of positive elements, in many ways it also contained many of the same kind of duplicitous and misleading statements one would have expected from his predecessor.
Blocking Palestinian Statehood
When President Barack Obama addressed the UN General Assembly in September 2010, he sounded hopeful that by the following year there would be “an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations — an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.” Sure enough, in September 2011, the Palestinians asked the UN Security Council to recognize a state of Palestine — but Obama ordered the U.S. delegate to veto the request. What gives?