Netherlands

Speaking to the Assembly one year ago, I demonstrated that the Kingdom of the Netherlands qualified for membership on the Security Council. During the elections two weeks later a substantial majority of this body supported us, and we are grateful to them. As the Netherlands has served on the Council now for more than eight months and is currently its President, I think it is only fair for me to report to all the Assembly members who showed confidence in us. I wish to speak on Africa, on the Council, and on shifting our attention from the State to the people. Most of today's armed conflicts are in Africa. From Sierra Leone to Eritrea and from the Sudan to the Congo and Angola, Africans are fighting Africans. Fighting accompanies all the plights and pains that are known to humankind, from poverty and pestilence to famine, fear and flight. Africa is not a land of troubles alone but also of happiness, not a continent only of catastrophe but also one of hope. The sheer mass of Africa's problems obscures our view of its promise and its potential. In the public mind, an unbalanced view of Africa prevails. That view, I feel, needs to be corrected: we need to rid ourselves of prejudice and think positively. Instead of dejection, we need a deepening commitment. Africa, despite the odds, has come a long way already. Personally, I was struck, at the opening of the general debate, by the sight of an African President of South Africa, speaking in front of an African President of the General Assembly, seated next to an African Secretary- General. It is hard to miss the symbolism of that image. It is one image the founding fathers of this Organization might not have had, one image that by itself already holds a promise for the future: the next century may well be the century of Africa. The Secretary-General, in his report on Africa, has made a link between conflict and prosperity. For this reason, my delegation felt that members of the Council would be well advised to consider this question in some depth, and, in our presidential capacity, we have therefore organized an open-ended public debate, to be held next week, in which the Secretary-General will brief us on the state of Africa. Let me now turn to the question of how to improve the effectiveness of the United Nations, and the Security Council in particular, in coping with crisis situations. On many occasions in its lifetime, I have admired the United Nations for the way it intervened in emergencies. In particular, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Food 21 Programme have enjoyed a long tradition of being in the forefront. Many non-governmental organizations, such as Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), have stood there right beside them. Let me pose a number of questions on how the Security Council performs in emergencies. First, do we not see a crisis coming before it breaks? Do we not have early warning systems? Of course we do. The call for establishing early warning systems has been around for decades; it has become a buzzword used whenever the inadequacies of the United Nations response machinery are being discussed. But in fact, given the level of communications in modern times, policy planners have plenty of information to be forward-looking. It is not the failing of an early warning system that can be put to blame, nor the lack of data. It is, instead, the failure of decision- makers to react adequately. Second question: Why, then, does the United Nations react inadequately? Do we not have preventive diplomacy? We do, not only in terms of bilateral efforts of major nations or of the good offices of the Secretary-General; the Council itself can be proactive. The recent mission it dispatched to East Timor is a good example of how the Council can be more assertive. Missions are an existing instrument that is, in my opinion, in need of an upgrade. In addition, the open debate on East Timor in the Council, at which everybody spoke plain language, fuelled the mounting international pressure on Indonesia. Third question: Is the problem, perhaps, the veto? I know this is a popular view, but it is also a tenuous one. True, we cannot ignore the veto as a factor in the Council's performance record. True again, in our discussions on reform of the Council, the veto is a core element we will one day have to come to grips with. Yet, the problem is an intractable one. Tampering with the veto may itself create the risk of dissolution for the United Nations as a whole. The very fact that a single Member State can hold the entire world community in limbo in the face of harrowing brutalities is affecting the stature and moral force of the Organization. That, too, may be spawning dissolution. It may be argued that, without the veto, the United Nations would not have survived its first 50 years. It may also be argued that, with the veto, the United Nations will not survive the next 50 years. In the first 50 years, the Organization might have fallen apart if the veto had not been there as a buffer against the push and pull of a bipolar world. In the second 50 years, in a multipolar world, repeated inaction by the Security Council would result in parallel actions outside the United Nations framework, pushing the Organization, as a custodian of world peace, more and more into the margins. No matter when or how the debate on the veto will end, this Assembly should meanwhile call on those who possess it to exercise maximum restraint, particularly in humanitarian emergencies. I concur with my German colleague that the permanent five are duty-bound to explain to the world why they are blocking action by the Council. Moreover, we might consider a situation in which a negative vote by a permanent member does not in itself block action. Fourth question: Does the problem lie in the political will, perhaps? To simply say that the political will has been lacking is not only a platitude, but also a very partial view of reality. For part of that reality is that images of all the conflicts on the globe travel around the world with the speed of light. The media broadcasts live images of human suffering. Understandably, such images rouse indignation and horror among millions of viewers. They expect instant action. As people are being better informed about current events, their level of expectation rises. The gap between what is expected and what is possible becomes more visible and more acute. By contrast, diplomacy comes with tools that may be old and respectable, but are also solid and slow. And so, while in a globalizing world human misery is disseminated along the electronic highway, diplomacy today still proceeds along a footpath. This leaves me with the central question: Why is the Council often running behind reality? How can we make it catch up with developments? As I look back at the general debate this week, I think that we are getting very close to identifying the main obstacle. I know that many interventions share a common element — they compare the notion of sovereignty to that of human rights and territorial integrity to humanitarian intervention. To be sure, the question per se is as old as the Charter itself. What is new is the venue. I cannot recall that Foreign Ministers at the General Assembly have talked about this question at any length before. I strongly believe that this issue was bound to surface at this level at some point or another. In 1945, the architects of this Organization included two contradictory premises: respect for territorial integrity and political independence, on the one hand; and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, on the other. 22 The world in those days was ruled by Governments alone, and so the United Nations was made up of States. At the time, the notion of human rights, although grafted onto the Charter with much conviction, was essentially at odds with classical legal thinking. In a way, the tension became even more pronounced at the adoption of the Universal Declaration. After all, for half a millennium the notion of sovereignty had served as the basis of our global political architecture. As the idea was enshrined in the Charter, the founding fathers believed it would stand the test of time. By contrast, the idea of human rights in international relations was, for the most part, a post-war novelty. Indeed, the Charter is much more specific on respect for sovereignty than on respect for human rights. Since 1945, the world has witnessed a gradual shift in that balance, making respect for human rights more and more mandatory and respect for sovereignty less and less stringent. An elaborate body of international human rights law has come to counterbalance the dictates of paragraphs 4 and 7 of Article 2. Today, human rights have come to outrank sovereignty. Increasingly, the prevailing interpretation of the Charter is that it aims to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them. Today, we regard it as a generally accepted rule of international law that no sovereign State has the right to terrorize its own citizens. Indeed, if the Charter were to be written today, there would be an Article 2.8 saying that nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize Member States to terrorize their own people. Let me go one step further. The blurring of the boundaries of sovereignty does not stop at human rights. In the future, the notion of sovereignty is going to be tested beyond that. Think of decrepit nuclear installations, massive damage to the environment, lack of water or mass marketing of narcotic drugs. Can responsible statesmen afford to wait until the damage is actually done? Or do they in fact have a duty to prevent it? These are questions which, at some point, the Security Council will have to be involved in. It is not the lack of early warning, not the absence of preventive diplomacy, not the veto per se. I call on every politician and every diplomat in this room to accept that the traditional balance between sovereignty and human rights, between the State and the people is shifting. I am convinced this is one of the paramount issues of our time. Momentum is building, and we should seize it. Let us put the issue squarely on the agenda: the agenda of the United Nations, of the Council and of our parliaments at home. I ask the legal community to keep a keen eye on the groundswell that is developing and to be innovative in its thinking. We politicians have a vast responsibility here. We should steer the discussion towards the people instead of the State. The Security Council should be stronger, not weaker. It should be a credible leader in the maintenance of peace. In order to be credible, it must be consistent, swift and proactive. It must show courage, drive and vision. It must keep changing with the times. It must put people over politics. That is a tall order. Its decision on East Timor gave us hope for the Council's potential.