The global community needs to reform the United Nations in order to make it more effective, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said at the opening ceremony of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
"It is absolutely essential to have the capacity to respond, and there is a huge responsibility of the United Nations," Guterres said. "We need to reform the UN, making it much more effective, much more cost-effective and much more linked to the needs of the people" UN Secretary General added.
"That is why I am so engaged both in the reform of the peace and security sector, the UN development system and our internal management processes in order to allow the UN to be more able to prevent conflicts and to help in solving the conflicts that exist… but especially in promoting the kind of solutions we need for the globalization to be more fair," TASS cited him as saying.
Besides, Guterres called on the countries to encourage business circles to respond to those challenges.
According to him, it is particularly important "that the people feel that governments and international organizations care for them" and "that trust can be reestablished as a key tool in order to be able for us to face the challenges of today."
The deputy dean of the Faculty of Global Economics and International Affairs of the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University, Andrei Suzdaltsev, speaking to Vestnik Kavkaza, recalled that proposals for reforming the UN have been coming for a long time. "In particular, we are talking about the reform of the Security Council with the expansion of its composition at the expense of Japan, India or Germany. There are options for reforming the various UN structures linked to the trade union and labor movement, the World Health Organization, and so on," he said.
"The UN problem is that its decisions are often not carried out even by those members of the organization that accept them. The fact that the UN has not become a world government is of course very annoying for some countries. Unfortunately, the international law level has not yet risen to such a state, when such a solid international organization could become an organ capable of carrying out its decisions directly, through the heads of national governments," Andrei Suzdaltsev noted.
The weakness of the UN as an international organization is due to the fact that its member countries see its goals too differently. "There is no cardinal changes there, and they are impossible now, because the countries have different views on the function, goals and ability of the UN to influence international processes," the deputy dean of the Faculty of Global Economics and International Affairs of the Higher School of Economics of the National Research University concluded.
The deputy head of the Council of the Russian Diplomats Association, Andrey Baklanov, in turn, said that he took the statement of Guterres with great skepticism. "The so-called reform of the UN is not a new slogan. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali carried out a number of interesting ideas in the early 1990s, but it was followed by Somalia, Yugoslavia, unresolved crises in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the danger of international terrorism has grown. Now it has come to such a shameful fact as the existence of the ISIS terrorist group (banned in Russia) on the territory of two independent UN member states," he recalled.
As the diplomat stressed, one should not speak about inefficient reform of the UN, but about using the potential that it possesses. "The organization has the UN Charter, and other various mechanisms that are not sufficiently used. At this stage, I would single out the creation of a well-functioning mechanism for verifying the facts as a key direction," Andrei Baklanov said.
There is no other such universal organization, like the UN, he stressed. "We should improve it. It is necessary to achieve that the stated goals are fulfilled, and those current organizational mechanisms are worked in the UN. This requires, in particular, an honest position on the part of a number of states, primarily Western ones, "Andrei Baklanov summed up.
