Group of World Affairs Experts Call on U.S. to Reassess Its Policy Toward the United Nations

A group of prominent international affairs experts, including three former Secretaries of State, issued a report today calling for the United States to reassess its policy toward the United Nations within the framework of American foreign policy goals.

The report, fitled “The United States and the United Nations … A Policy for Today,”was issued by the Ad Hoc Group on United States Policy Toward the United Nations. The group, which is headed by Marris Abram, former U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on Human Rights, first presented itsreport to Jeone Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, at a private meeting. It was later made public at a press conference in Abram’s office.

URGE U.S. TO WORK OUTSIDE THE UN

While stressing that “our interdependent world needs the UN” and the principles enunciated in its Charter, and that it continues to be in the American interest to use the UN as a significant foreign policy forum, the group urged that the U.S. be prepared to “act alone” or with others outside the UN, in light of deterioration in the capacity of the world organization to deal impartially and effectively with questions of world concern.

The UN system, with some good works in the cause of peace, economic and social betterment and human rights, also reflects — and occasionally aggravates — the dangerous international environment in which the U.S. finds itself,” the report stated.

UN ‘POLITICIZED BEHAVIOR’ CITED

It noted that UN activity has been increasingly marked by “politicized behavior” and a “tyranny of the majority” that keeps it from functioning effectively in accord with the UN Charter.

In reviewing major substantive areas of UN concern — international peace and security, the Middle East, intermational terrorism, human rights, and arms control — the group of experts singled out the “strange failure” of the UN to endorse the Camp David agreements and complained that the UN agencies and conferences were “seriously compromised by the interjection of extraneous issues,” notably attacks on Israel.

Recalling early hopes that the UN’s programs in the health, labor, science, culture and other specialized and technical areas would be insulated from interstate “high politics,” the report urged that the U.S. consider not attending, or withholding financial support from specialized agencies or conferences whose purposes have been compromised by extraneous issues. It singled out the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as “the most troubling.”

The report stated that the UN human rights agencies still have a long way to go in correcting the selective morality that concentrates on violations in a few countries only and ignores others, “Neither authoritorian nor totalitarian regimes should be permitted to subscribe formally to international human rights standards while violating them in practice,” the report declared, adding that the defense of human rights should be a permanent part of the U.S. foreign policy agenda.

The report concluded by noting that the UN’s “moral integrity is its most precious resource,” and the U.S. should help make clear that the organization’s “strength lies in a reputation for fairness, objectivity and effectiveness,”without which it cannot command respect.

The signers of the report included three former Democratic Secretaries of State, Dean Rusk, Cyrus Vance and Edmund Muskie; former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Henry Cabot Lodge; former U.S. Representatives to the UN Commission on Human Rights Rita Houser, Philip Hoffman and Jerome Shestack; former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Richard Gardner; and former Counsellor of the State Department Matthew Nimetz.

Seymour Finger, director of the Ralph Bunche Institute, served as rapporteur, and Sidney Liskofsky, program consultant to the American Jewish Committee’s Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, served as coordinator for the Ad Hoc Group.