Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-09-28-Speech-3-285"
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"en.20050928.24.3-285"2
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"Mr President, the United Nations evolved from various initiatives to bring the countries of the world together to promote true peace through the recognition of the dignity and worth of the human person and the value of the community – local, national, and global – in protecting the person. In many ways over 60-plus years the UN has accomplished this vital mandate. However, in recent decades there has been increasing criticism of the way the UN does business, the way it spends its money and the type of results it is getting or not getting.
The Millennium challenge is enormous and it will take a functional UN to meet it. Reform is nothing to be ashamed of. Even the tidiest house needs a spring-clean. Every organisation needs to step back and review its methods. I think the example of UNICEF is a good place to start in understanding the desperate and urgent need to reform the UN.
Jim Grant led and largely created UNICEF, the UN response to children, until he died in 1995. UNICEF justifiably earned the respect of countries and agencies everywhere for its programmes of oral rehydration, breastfeeding promotion, and primary education. UNICEF was in touch with the real needs of real children. Over the ten years since Mr Grant's death, UNICEF seemed to become a vehicle not for promoting children, but a political agenda focused on women's rights, which was not the appropriate place: it was a children's agency.
Ms Bellamy, who directed UNICEF after Mr Grant, was forced to resign last year. Although criticism was building over nine years of her tenure, the UN structures as they have evolved did not allow any internal investigation of UNICEF. Only from the outside did an accumulation of critics and a growing scandal about the neglect of children's programmes eventually force her resignation. Last year, amidst the final crescendo, publications such as
were reporting that UNICEF's failure to develop a coherent strategy for child survival and its shortcomings were contributing to 10 million child deaths per year. For an organisation to tolerate this, such a publicly known problem, shows it needs reform.
There is no disgrace in reform. No, there is only disgrace in resisting reform where it is needed. Success will come when we realise that the UN is an ideal that needs to be fostered and that we need an efficient organisation that can serve these ideals."@en1
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