Why Next Week S Summit Matters to the Uk

“WHY NEXT WEEK’S SUMMIT MATTERS TO THE UK”

SPEECH BY DR KIM HOWELLS

INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH

WEDNESDAY 7 SEPTEMBER

David and David, Ladies and Gentlemen

The Institute of Public Policy Research is an organisation for which I have a great deal of respect. Although the IPPR’s international programme was established only three years ago, it has already made a significant contribution to the debate on international policy – at a time when that debate is more open and more vital than ever. IPPR combines a deep understanding of government with intellectual rigour and an independent, progressive perspective. On more than one occasion over the past three years I have been grateful for the fresh approach it has suggested to a difficult problem. It is a great pleasure, therefore, for me to be invited to speak here today.

The topic which I was asked to address was: “the UK Government’s specific priorities for the UN Millennium Review Summit”. Having begun with some modest flattery, David, I feel a little safer in now giving you three reasons why I will not actually be speaking to that exact theme.

The first reason is that, as the UK is currently President of the EU, at the UN Summit we will, for the most part, be representing EU priorities rather than specifically UK priorities. These rarely differ in anything but fine detail but it is worth setting this context.

Secondly, while the EU and the UK do have specific objectives, our single over-riding priority is one we share with virtually every other member state – fashioning an effective UN that help us tackle the global challenges we all face. We will not achieve this if states – including the UK – stick rigidly to entrenched positions of national interest. There will need to be compromise and consensus.

Finally, when we speak of ‘UK government priorities’ for a Summit we may be in danger of unconsciously reinforcing a misconception widely held in this country. This misconception being that foreign policy – and for that matter the Foreign Office – deals with high diplomacy unconnected to the real world and of interest only to politicians and historians. As Ernie Bevin famously put it: “Foreign policy isn't something that is great and big, it's common sense and humanity as it applies to my affairs and yours”.

So taking these reasons together, and rather like an undergraduate with a difficult essay to write, I am going to redefine the question which David set me. I want to ask instead why does what happens in New York matter for the man or woman on the street in this country? And if indeed it does matter, what is the UK doing to make sure that it is a success?

There are, of course, a very large group of people in this country who need no convincing about the importance of next week’s Summit. The massive response to the Tsunami appeal, the popularity of Live 8 and the intense interest surrounding Gleneagles prove that British people – including many with direct family links to the developing world – feel passionately about the global development agenda. They will know that development is one of the key themes of the summit and will be watching closely. Similarly, London is home to more human rights NGOs than any other city in the world. Amnesty International UK, the biggest, has more than a quarter of a million members and supporters. So I expect that interest in the human rights theme of the summit will be intense.

Let’s assume, however, that the particular man in the street we need to convince does not care about any of this. He is unmoved by the fact that last weekend 60 000 children – enough to fill the stadium at Old Trafford – died of preventable diseases. He is unable to see the thread of common humanity that links him to the oppressed people of Burma, Zimbabwe and North Korea. We need to show him how his life, not the lives of others, will be improved as a result of this summit.

Security, the third and final theme to the Summit, is a good place to start. And within that, perhaps the two areas where the connection to British interests is most direct are counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation.

The events of July are still vivid in our minds. London, has, of course, suffered from terrorism before. But the nature of this threat is different. It is one that confronts every government and from which no country is safe. International terrorism requires an international response. We pay the price for each others’ vulnerabilities. We must work together to disrupt international networks, prevent travel for training and planning, and cut-off access to money and materials. This means effective national responses linked by tight international co-operations.

The United Nations has a big part to play in achieving this. It has already played a vital role in setting international standards - and then encouraging and helping States to meet them. But as the Secretary General set out in his strategy document in March, the United Nations can and should do more. Much of that strategy is about the hard slog of making a large organisation more effective. I will come later to how the Summit will support this important work.

But the real advance at this Summit will be on the first of the Secretary General's strategic objectives - deploying the moral authority of the UN more effectively to discourage terrorism. All our efforts are weakened by the lack a definition of what actually constitutes terrorism. I hope that the Summit will address this by making a clear statement that the targeting and deliberate killing of civilians and non-combatants can never be justified or legitimised by any cause or grievance. The Summit should also commit to concluding within a year the Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism which includes an unambiguous definition of terrorist acts. Alongside the General Assembly's rejection of any justification for terrorism, we hope the Security Council will urge States to act against those inciting it. The result should be a stronger signal that the international community rejects and will act against those who justify and promote terrorism.

The atrocities in London reminded us of the very real threat that international terrorism poses on our own shores. The threat to the UK posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction goes wider. The use anywhere in the world of such weapons – and of nuclear weapons in particular –would have catastrophic global consequences.

Here again, an international response is needed; we are all vulnerable to the weakest link in the non-proliferation regime. Unfortunately, in recent months, the international community has sometimes let tensions come to the surface on this important problem. As you will all be aware, the Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference at the end of May broke up without agreement on a final document. There are precedents for this – the review conferences in 1980 and 1990 also failed to reach agreement – and good work is carrying on in other fora, including the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the IAEA. But it was still disappointing. The UN Millennium Summit presents an opportunity to strongly reaffirm the international consensus against proliferation and to reiterate our support for all elements of the non-proliferation regime, including the NPT. We need to do so now more than ever. The situation over Iran is particularly worrying. The Iranian government’s decision to resume its uranium enrichment programme was in clear defiance of seven successive resolutions by the IAEA board. There are strong grounds for concern that Iran is developing nuclear weapons in breach of its NPT obligations. We urge them to reconsider.

Of course, the security agenda at the Summit goes much wider than counter-terrorism and non-proliferation. It is about building lasting peace in conflict zones around the world. There is of course, a clear moral reason for us to do so. How could there not be? In the decade beginning in 1994 it is estimated that in Africa alone, more than 9 million people died as a result of conflict. That’s more than the number killed on all the horrific battlefields of the first world war. Moreover, the vast majority of the deaths in Africa were of non-combatants – women and children struck down by disease and malnutrition.

This is reason enough. But, if we need, we can also make a case that it is in our own interests to work with the United Nations to resolve conflicts in what Neville Chamberlain might have referred to as ‘a faraway country of which we know little’?

Chamberlain delivered these famous words on Czechoslovakia in 1938. Twelve years earlier in one of the key Foreign Office memoranda of the inter-war years, the better argument had already been put forward: “The fact is that war and rumour of war, quarrels and friction, in any corner of the world spell loss and harm to British commercial and financial interests … whatever else may be the outcome of a disturbance of the peace, we shall be the losers”.

This was a viewpoint clearly inspired by the practicalities of a bygone empire but it is equally applicable to the realities of today’s Britain. We operate in an ever more interdependent world where the problems of one country are bound inextricably with the security and prosperity of another. The terrible global traffic in drugs and in people often has its roots in conflict zones where there has been a break down in government and large-scale displacement of refugees. Instability and uncertainty threaten international trade and investment. Sales of goods and services abroad account for about a quarter of our national GDP; our direct investment abroad is over £600 billion. A stable global environment is plainly in our interest.

The Summit next week is poised to take a significant step towards building such an environment through the establishment of a UN Peacebuilding Commission. In doing so it would make a real contribution to peace. Half of all countries emerging from conflict relapse back into violence within five years. This is sometimes because the underlying causes of the initial conflict have not been resolved. Elsewhere it may be because the mechanisms to reintegrate former warring parties and refugees back into society have not been put in place. Or it might be because the conflict itself has destroyed the economic basis needed for a society to start seeing the tangible dividends of peace. In these situations it is easy to see how, when international attention moves on to the next crisis, conflict can re-occur.

The Peacebuilding Commission will directly address these problems and provide a more coherent and co-ordinated UN and international approach to conflict resolution and post-conflict peace-building. Crucially, it will work to extend the period of attention given by the international community to post-conflict recovery and ensure predictable and targeted financing for measures that will help prevent countries relapsing back into a conflict after a few years. We want to set an ambitious timetable of the end of this year for the Commission to be up and running.

It is possible to show convincingly, then, how decisions on security taken next week in New York will have a direct bearing on the UK. But what about the other two themes that I mentioned – development and human rights? How do we prove that these are directly relevant to our national interests?

There are certainly some people who suspect the developed world – the so-called ‘North’ – of having just such an agenda. They believe that a pervasive division undermines the UN; richer countries such as the UK care only about the ‘hard threats’ of security, terrorism and proliferation. Poorer countries – the so-called ‘South’ – are left to focus on the ‘soft threats’ of hunger, disease and poverty.

This argument does not stand up to close analysis. There is a growing consensus that security, development and human rights are, in fact, interlinked. Even if a member state were interested in only one of these problems – and this is certainly not true of the UK – it could only hope to succeed by addressing all three.

A study by the economist Paul Collier, for example, showed links between increased development and better security. He suggested that doubling the per capita income of a country approximately halves the risk of civil war. The reverse is also true, failure to address social and economic issues can cause conflict or hamper our ability to respond to it. Conflict over scarce resources has helped to fuel violence in Cote D’Ivoire, Darfur and the NileBasin. HIV will decimate the Southern African armies – some of the strongest peacekeeping nations in Africa.

The summit in New York, therefore, is a chance to renew the momentum behind the Millennium Development Goals. Although there have been successes, particularly in Asia, the situation in sub-Saharan Africa remains dire. The region is not on target to meet any of the goals and for three of them – those on hunger, poverty and sanitation – it is actually going backwards. Earlier this year the EU set a timetable to reach new levels of official development assistance – 0.56 per cent of Gross National Income by 2010 and 0.7 per cent by 2015, half of it earmarked for Africa. We want other developed countries to do the same. In advance of the Summit, EU Finance Ministers will this weekend discuss the G8 proposal to cancel 100 per cent of the outstanding multilateral debt of eligible Heavily Indebted Poor Countries. They will also discuss innovative financing mechanisms such as the International Finance Facility and a solidarity contribution on airline tickets to finance development. This week, the UK and others [launched/will launch] the International Finance Facility for Immunisation. By front-loading funding for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, it will save the lives of five million children by 2015 and 5 million thereafter.

Looking forward to the WTO ministerial in December, we will also be looking to build momentum for action on trade at the Summit. An ambitious outcome to the Doha Round could reduce the number of people living on less than $2 a day by 144 million. To put that in context, we would be lifting out of poverty more people than the total population of Russia. The EU has shown great leadership on increasing aid this year. We now need to do the same on trade.

Just as important as increasing aid is making sure that it is used better and more effectively – driving up standards of governance and helping the poorest people for whom it is intended. The summit is an opportunity for the developing world to commit to ambitious national development strategies which reinforce good governance structures and foster a positive environment for economic growth. In turn the developed world must untie our aid, make it more predictable and, where possible, harmonise our programmes with other donors – so that our aid supports developing countries own efforts to reform.

Urgent global action is also needed to mitigate climate change – a serious, long-term challenge for every part of the world. At the summit, member states should signal their intention to start negotiations on a more inclusive and equitable international framework beyond 2012.

The final theme of the summit is human rights. Again, the links with security are clear. Inequality and social exclusion have contributed to many internal conflicts around the world. Injustice, religious intolerance, and lack of democratic accountability have all been used by terrorists as a pretext for their mindless violence. Human rights also has a symbiotic relationship with development. Another distinguised economist Amartya Sen has shown that there is hardly any case where a country which is independent, democratic and with an uncensored press has suffered a famine. Conversely in President Mugabe’s oppressive regime wehave an appalling example of how lack of respect for human rights has wrecked what was one of the strongest economies in the region. The social consequences have been dire: infant mortality rates have increased; life expectancy has decreased.

At the summit we hope to agree a radical overhaul of the UN human rights machinery. To take it, as Kofi Annan has said, from the ‘era of legislation to the era of implementation’. We hope to reach agreement on replacing the Commission on Human Rights with a Human Rights Council with a robust mandate. We believe that the future of this Council should be as a main free-standing charter body of the UN. This would reflect the central position of human rights in the UN system and place human rights on the same institutional footing as development, peace and security. We also want the summit to agree to reinforce the role and resources of the High Commissioner of Human Rights. And we will push hard for a clear statement on the Responsibility to Protect. This is long overdue. The international community cannot stand by in the face of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.

In support of these three interlinked themes – security, development and human rights – we need a United Nations that can respond quickly and effectively to today’s challenges. The UK has long supported the case for expanding the Security Council, with both permanent and non-permanent members. We support permanent seats for Germany, Japan, India and Brazil. We also want to see a permanent member from Africa on the Council. More non-permanent members would give us the chance to increase the voice of the developing world in the Council’s discussions. That must be right, as some much of the Council’s work mow touches the developing world directly.

It looks increasingly unlikely that there will be agreement on Security Council reform at the UN Summit. But in the meantime we can push ahead with enhancing the Council’s working methods and with improving the performance of ECOSOC and the General Assembly. ECOSOC should fulfil its role more effectively and the General Assembly should concern itself with genuine priorities and no longer dabble with matters of marginal interest or on which substantive decisions have already been taken.

If the United Nations is going to continue to adapt in the face of emerging tasks, it must also have the ability to bring resources to bear where they are needed most. Kofi Annan has asked for more flexibility in the management of his staff and resources. We should give it to him. In return, he is ready to make his organisation more transparent and accountable. And we should also review the General Assembly mandates and discard those that are redundant or anachronistic. This flexibility is needed equally at the operational level. We expect the summit to agree to more predictable humanitarian funding and to better standby arrangements of personnel and equipment. This will allow the UN to respond quickly to such unforeseen emergencies as the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

Ladies and Gentleman