UN goal may not be practical

In less than a month's time September 16 and 17 the world's great and good will be gathering at the UN building in Manhattan for what is officially called the High Level Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly.

This meeting has become a regular event in recent years, but rather one of ceremonial importance.

This year, however, it will be very significant indeed. For the Plenary Session will almost certainly pass an obscure document, now circulating in draft form among UN delegations, that calls on the assembled governments to reaffirm their support for the UN's Millenium Declaration Goals and the other declarations of UN conferences over the past 30 years.

It will ask them to support the achievement of these goals in a coordinated and integrated manner, to renew their commitment to …

Falling asleep already, are you? Well, that is precisely the intention of those who composed these anodyne phrases. When bureaucrats seize power, they do it not with swords but with chloroform.

And this document is a power-grab by people of whom you have never heard, the officials of the UN Secretariat, working in tandem with the diplomats of those countries and international organisations that would like to expand the power of the UN and its various agencies over both the citizens and governments of member-nations.

You might suppose that, given the spreading scandal of the UN's Oil-for-Food programme, in which a regiment of UN officials was corruptly assisting Saddam Hussain to outwit the very sanctions they were supposed to be enforcing, the UN Secretariat would be on the defensive.

And tucked away towards the end of this document, there are provisions to increase the transparency and accountability of UN agencies and their officials. In a rational world they would be whole of the document.

Alas, anyone who ploughed through the 158 provisions will discover that its main thrust is to extend the UN's power directly into countries and over the lives of citizens, corporations and private bodies.

That ambition is not, of course, advertised. Most of the language used, in addition to being sleep-inducing, is mildly benevolent in tone.

For instance: "We recognise that development, peace and security and human rights are interlinked and mutually reinforcing and cannot be enjoyed without each other."

Platitudes

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Of course, it's not true. China today is enjoying economic development of almost unprecedented rapidity under a government that has only a limited regard for such human rights as free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion.

Always beware when politicians throw platitudes at you. More dangerous than platitudes, however, are commitments since the governments signing on to them often have only the vaguest notion of what they imply.

Now there are 158 provisions in this document, some of which contain 10 or 12 commitments that may change when judges interpret the treaties in a way no one would have predicted when they were signed.

A topical example: the British Government is currently trying to deport terrorist suspects it considers a danger to the public, but the courts maintain that such deportations are contrary to Britain's signature on the European Declaration of Human Rights.

In other words, the most sensitive and vital political questions are removed from democratic parliaments and the voters and handed over to an international committee nominated by foreign and often despotic regimes.

Yet the US Government is coming under enormous pressure to end or set this catalogue of potential interventions as a result of pressure not from despots but from its closest democratic friends.

The European Union is strongly in favour of transferring power from nation-states to transnational bodies because it itself is a transnational body and sees itself as the harbinger of a new sort of transnational political order superior to sovereign nation-states.

And the current presidency of the EU is held by Tony Blair, the US president's best friend, who is himself an extreme devotee of "muscular multilateralism".

Blair's pressure is likely to be augmented, moreover, by "realists" in the Bush administration who will argue that opposing the UN document is pointless.

It will annoy our allies, alienate the international community and divide America all to stop a document that is best meaningless and at worst Utopian.

Such diplomatic trade-offs must sometimes be made. Unfortunately, they never stop with the first one.

The time to halt this diplomatic rake's progress is now and to do so on the principle that Americans are a self-governing people. American democracy needs no external examiners.

John O'Sullivan, former adviser to former British Prime Minister, Lady Thatcher, and former editorial page editor of The Post, is editor-at-large of the National Review and a member of Benador Associates.