Kingdom of the Netherlands, 1999

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

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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.

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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.