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ElBaradei calls for UNSC reform
 The head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency on Saturday called for the reform and expansion of the UN Security Council, saying its engagement in maintaining world peace and security is often inadequate, selective or after the fact.
| ... and it was originally designed to be that way... |
Mohamed ElBaradei said the Security Councils efforts to control arms have not been systematic or successful in the case of Iraq, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. When dealing with threats of nuclear proliferation and arms control, the Security Council has too often fallen short. It has made little effort to address nuclear proliferation in context, said ElBaradei, head of the Vienna, Austria-based International Agency for Atomic Energy. It has not responded or followed up effectively to the emergence of new countries with nuclear weapons. It is clearly time for the Security Council to be reformed, expanded and strengthened, he said in a speech.
| The UNSC is rendered ineffective because of the veto power retained by the major powers. None is going to give it up, because they don't want their interests threatened, which would happen regularly given a simple majority rule. Adding numbers does nothing to make the council more effective. All the non-veto members are mere window dressing, for one thing. For another thing, adding members to a committe has the net effect of lowering its effectiveness. See Parkinson, C. Northcote, just about anything he ever wrote. The man was a saint. |
He also said: the case of Darfur ... continues to suffer from the inability of the Security Council to muster sufficient peacekeeping troops. ElBaradei noted that in the civil war in Rwanda in 1994, the Security Council was unable to move much beyond hand-wringing, with the result that 800,000 people lost their lives in the span of a few months.
In virtually every crisis the League of Nations UN as a whole has been unable to move much beyond hand-wringing. That's why it should be abolished and replaced with a series of regional alliances. |
Posted by: Fred 2006-03-26 |
