Impotent UN’s Russian wrist slap is a disgrace

Today in New York, by 93 votes in favour and 24 against, with 58 abstentions, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted to suspend Russia from the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. China voted against the suspension, which was proposed by the US; India abstained. The EU, like the UK, came out in favour. 

It was a historic vote, yet one that will have zero impact on events on the ground.The resolution called on the UN to express its “grave concern” over the crisis in Ukraine, including “gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights”. A narrow majority of those taking part in the debate supported the US, but the usual suspects on the No side were joined by others who appeared to think, if it’s Russia today, it could be us tomorrow. 

Given the horrific nature of Russia’s “special military operation,” now entering its seventh week, the vote must be seen as little more more than a slap on the wrist, to be administered perhaps by Will Smith to the Russian ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya. 

Nebenzya was briefly Vladmir Putin’s director for humanitarian cooperation and human rights and even served a year as the Great Dictator’s number two in the very division in Geneva from which he and his successors might in future be excluded. But I’m sure the irony would be lost on him. 

Nor will he or his boss lose much sleep over the UN’s opinion of Russia’s record in Ukraine – the more so since the vote was far from unanimous. 

There is only one article in the United Nations Charter that interests Russia (and China, and, for much of the time, the US) and that is Article 27, which, while never mentioning the word “veto,” allows any one of the permanent members of the council (the nuclear powers) to block the adoption of any “substantive” draft resolution with which it disagrees.  

There is no override power. Under the existing rules, the General Assembly, made up of representatives of all but two of the world’s 195 recognised states, is powerless to act. A veto is a veto and there is an end to it. There is no reference in the Charter to what can be done to punish or remove a member of the Security Council that has acted in defiance of the rules of war, no matter how egregiously. Ambassador Nebenskya need only say niet and the matter would be concluded. 

But in the meantime, Russia will be packing up its things in Geneva and placing them in storage until its suspension from the Human Rights Council is lifted. The 43-member body, under the presidency of Argentinian diplomat Federico Villegas, is supposed to be representative of the world’s different regions, and it is certainly that. Since its formation in 2006, it has been criticised for regularly including nations noted for their abuses of human rights, including, alongside Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Somalia and Libya. 

Is anyone surprised by this? 

There’s a lot I didn’t know about the United Nations – as arcane and secretive a body as the Magic Circle. I didn’t know until yesterday, for example, that the first meeting of the General Assembly took place in London, not New York, in 1946 and that it was Churchill, after appealing to Roosevelt, who ensured that France was one of the five permanent members of the Security Council.  

What I do know is that in the 76 years that have passed between 1946 and now, very little that is worth knowing has much to do with the UN.  

I doubt that more than one person in fifty outside of New York’s United Nations Plaza could name the organisation’s current secretary-general, former Portuguese prime minister [His Excellency] António Guterres, who once headed the even more absurd and meaningless Socialist International.  

Guterres is not stupid. He means well and enjoyed a respectable career in Portuguese national politics, starting in 1974 when democracy was restored after decades of quasi-Fascist dictatorship. Early on, he helped negotiate his country’s entry into the EU, and as prime minister he introduced a number of necessary social and economic reforms. But things went quickly downhill during his second term in office, causing him to switch his focus to the international arena. In 2005, he was appointed UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and in January 2017 he secured the plum job, Secretary-General, the first European to head the organisation since the former Nazi stormtrooper, Kurt Waldheim.  

Although paid a mere $227,000 a year (unchanged since 1997), Guterres, like all his 37,000 colleagues round the world, is effectively exempt from income tax. He lives free-of-charge in a four-storey town house close to the office, entertains lavishly and is guarded 24 hours a day by a security detail drawn (who would have thought it?) from the 11,000-strong United Nations Police.  

And that, really, is all you need to know about António Guterres. There is no tragedy in the world that he hasn’t addressed in recent days, no disaster he hasn’t lamented, no injustice he hasn’t condemned. He is happily scandal-free. He simply doesn’t matter all that much.  

Which brings us to the bigger picture. Since 1946, the world has been almost permanently at war. That is not the fault of the United Nations. The UN has done its best to end the various conflicts, large and small, and its various agencies can usually be relied on to help tend the wounds. Its peacekeepers, the Blue Helmets, drawn from sympathetic member states, are usually there or thereabouts once a ceasefire has been agreed. The reality, however, is that they are always far too little far too late. In short, they change nothing.  

While the secretary-general – invariably presented as neutral – is nominally in charge of what goes on in United Nations Plaza, real power, as we have seen, is reposed in the Security Council, set up ostensibly to ensure that World War II should not have a nuclear sequel and that, along the way, lesser conflicts should be brought to an end as painlessly as possible.  

The Council enjoys considerable, if largely spurious, prestige, which is why the European Union dreams of one-day replacing the UK and France on the roster of permanent members, alongside the US, China and Russia. But it is a club that jealously guards its privileges. The ten temporary members, elected to serve for two years, sit alongside the “Great Powers” but are routinely ignored when it comes to the decisions that matter. This year, Ireland is one of the ten, and it is no criticism of its ambassador, Geraldine Nason, a past Chair of the Commission on the Status of Women, to say that she was not expected to out-muscle Nebenzya when it came to yesterday’s vote.  

What, though, of the “good work” the UN does in other, less contentious areas? What of the International Court of Justice, the World Bank and the World Health Organisation, all of which are in some way linked to the UN? And what about all those acronymous agencies – UNESCO, UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, UNDP, UNFPA, UNODC and ILO? Don’t they prove their worth, at least some of the time Wouldn’t we be worse off without them, even if we don’t always know what they are or what it is they get up to?  

The answer, with due reservation, is Yes. They each have their place, and if they didn’t exist, we would probably have to invent them – except (remembering most recently the role of the WHO in exonerating China from blame over Covid-19) that they could all be better run and less riven with controversy if they came under closer and more expert supervision.  

In the meantime, we are where we are, which means that the United Nations is the best the world has to offer when it faces disaster or evil or, in the case of Ukraine, both.  

Yesterday’s speeches in New York could in the main have been written by computer, rendered into UN-speak by Google Translate. It was the vote alone that counted, and then only up to a point. In Ukraine, the war goes on uninterrupted.  

As to whom we should blame for the impotence and waste of the world body, we need look no further than the human condition. The UN is what we have made of it, an institution born of good intentions, wreathed in rhetoric, steeped in corruption, bound together by an illusion that few actually share. We may despise it, we may wish it gone, but we would do well to remember that it was castrated at birth so that it would not dare bare its teeth at the most powerful nation states. How in that case can we complain that it has no balls?