Bolton Urges U.N. to Step Up Pace of Reforms

John Bolton, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, tells other U.N. on that time is running out on efforts to reform the organization.

The New York Times reports, the United States wants to scrap more than 400 passages in a 38-page draft prepared under the General Assembly president, Jean Ping of Gabon, that was being readied for a summit conference next month:

"Time is short," Mr. Bolton said in a letter to the 190 other United Nations ambassadors. He proposed immediate negotiations, starting with Mr. Ping's draft, and urged his fellow envoys to remain "open to alternative formats if they help us achieve consensus."

According to the Times, the changes under consideration include:

Substitution of the Human Rights Commission with a more powerful Human Rights Council that would no longer allow rights violators onto the panel;

Creation of a Peacebuilding Commission to help countries emerging from conflict;

Defining terrorism to exclude its justification as a national resistance or liberation tool; and

Empowerment of the international community to intervene in countries that fail to protect their people from genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Ambassador Bolton's efforts to reform the U.N. come shortly after Bolton obtained a promise from the head of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) that the UNDP will work to avoid financing one-sided political campaigns as it did recently in Gaza. In Gaza, T-shirts and posters distributed by Palestinian Arabs and urging future Israeli concessions bore the U.N. agency's logo:

Today Gaza, Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem

Not a bad start for Ambassador Bolton.

Comments

[Doug]

If Danforth were still ambassador, would we even be talking about U.N. reform? Without a character like Bolton, I find it hard to believe that 1) the public would be as interested as it is now in the U.N. and 2) that any reform would actually be taking place.