UN Panel on ‘Threats, Challenges, Change’

The UN Panel on ‘Threats, Challenges and Change’ presents a comprehensive reform agenda for the UN and other international actors in their efforts to promote international peace and security. Along with the MDGs process, it will inform the UN Millennium Summit in September this year. Alex Ramsbotham, UN Association, outlines the implications for the development community.

2nd December 2004 saw the launch of what is likely to be regarded as one of most important reports on global security to emerge from the United Nations. Entitled, ‘A more secure world: our shared responsibility’, it is the product of a year's work by a 16-member High-Level Panel appointed by the UN Secretary-General at a time when the international community was severely divided over the decision to go to war in Iraq - a period described by Kofi Annan as a 'fork in the road' for the UN. He challenged the Panel to look beyond Iraq to generate new ideas about the kinds of policies and institutions required for the UN to be effective in the 21st century.

Relevance to the Development Community
The Panel's report is of direct relevance to the development community. It explicitly extends beyond a narrow definition of state security, incorporating 'development as the indispensable foundation of a new collective security'. Economic and social dangers, including poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation, form one of six clusters of contemporary threats. The Panel sees creating a 'new and broader understanding' of security as the central challenge for the 21st century, built around a 'shared consensus about the meaning and responsibility of collective security' and demanding a range of responses at national, regional and global levels.

Key Recommendations

Peacebuilding Commission
The Panel identifies as a key institutional gap in the UN system the lack of a UN organ 'explicitly designed to avoid State collapse and the slide to war or to assist countries in their transition from war to peace'. It recommends establishing a Peacebuilding Commission, the core functions of which would be to:

• identify countries under stress and at risk;
• organise proactive assistance to halt that process;
• help in planning transitions between conflict and post-conflict peacebuilding;
• marshal and sustain international efforts in post-conflict peacebuilding over the required period.

This essentially falls short of more radical ideas for a new Economic and Social Security Council with power to direct the work of the Bretton Woods Institutions under a broader umbrella. However, the report is not necessarily weaker as a result. The Peacebuilding Commission offers a more immediately implementable proposal and could make a real contribution to the integration of the UN's development and conflict responses in the near future.

Security Council Reform
The Panel acknowledges both the need to reform the UN Security Council and that the Council is still the UN body most able to respond quickly to new threats. Reform of the Council must, therefore, both increase its effectiveness and credibility and enhance its capacity and willingness to act.

Two proposals are recommended to encourage broader representation. Both entail an expansion to 24 members. The first proposes six new permanent seats without veto and three new non-permanent seats for two-year terms. The second proposes no new permanent seats. Instead, it suggests eight four-year renewable-term seats and a single, two-year seat that is non-renewable. Both models involve a distribution of seats between four regional areas: Africa; Asia and Pacific; Europe and Americas.

The Panel urged that discussions over Security Council reform do not divert attention from decisions on the many other recommendations contained in the report, the validity and viability of which do not depend on Security Council enlargement.

Next Steps
The Panel's report forms part of the wider UN Millennium process. Kofi Annan will be personally promoting and discussing the report in the build up to the UN General Assembly's 60th session in September 2005, and in particular the high-level (Heads of State and Government) plenary meeting of the Assembly to review implementation of the Millennium Declaration and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The Secretary-General will be issuing his own report in the near future highlighting recommendations of the Panel which he feels require special attention and action by States.

Contact Alex Ramsbotham

UN panel report to download