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UN Performance Problems UN Management Accountability Struggles Where is the Rule of Law? Inadequate UN Oversight Recent Developments
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One of the most
refreshing, and newest, developments on the international scene is the
emergence of a global movement toward the "right to know." This trend has great import for
enhancing the transparency and accountability efforts of public, private,
and international organizations (such as the UN). According to an article
by Thomas Blanton in 2002: "During the last decade, 26
countries have enacted new legislation giving their citizens access to
government information. Why?
Because the concept of freedom of information is evolving from a
moral indictment of secrecy to a tool for market regulation, more
efficient government, and economic and technological growth.
Making good use of both moral and
efficiency claims, the international freedom of information movement
stands on the verge of changing the definition of democratic
governance. The movement is
creating a new norm, a new expectation, and a new threshhold requirement
for any government to be considered a democracy.
Perhaps the ultimate challenge for
the freedom-of-information movement will be the need for governments and
citizens alike to adapt to a new cultural and psychological climate.
in
the words of the Bulgarian activist Gergana Jouleva, "Democracy is not an
easy task neither for the authorities nor for the citizens." Thomas Blanton, "The world's right to know," Foreign Policy, July-August 2002, pp. 50-58 [lead-in, pp. 56-58]. [Note: the article contains an excellent resource guide on sources and studies dealing with this issue] In a follow-up article
a year later, Blanton noted that Armenia had become the 51st country to
guarantee its citizens the right to know what their government is up
to. He noted further that
Armenia's action is part of: "the worldwide movement that took
off in the 1990s and just this year also brought in the world's second
most populous country, India, and one of China's largest cities,
Guangzhou. The new openness laws vary
tremendously, face huge implementation problems, and often receive only
lip service from bureaucrats.
But the trend is producing much more government accountability and
often dramatic headlines.
Ironically,
this extraordinary
progress [occurs] at the very time that the United States is backing away
from its previous leadership in open government.
While the U.S. Freedom of
Information Act continues its status as the most-used in the world (over
two million requests per year at a cost of about a dollar per citizen),
delays and backlogs are mounting as top officials throw sand in the
gears. The administration's reflexive
secrecy will be self-defeating.
The right to know fights terrorism,
corruption, and repression.
The world is embracing, while Washington willfully forgets, the
familiar finding by Justice Louis Brandeis: "sunlight is the best
disinfectant." Thomas Blanton, "The right to know is gaining around the world," International Herald Tribune, October 11, 2003. [Note: Mr. Blanton is also the managing editor of www.freedominfo.org , a web network of international access advocates] The most recent update
to this website, posted on May 12 2004, shows further progress. The full
report, plus a map on worldwide access, and news stories, reports, case
studies, and analysis are also available. The report states
that: "A new era of government
transparency has arrived. It
is now widely recognized that the culture of secrecy that has been the
modus operandi of governments for centuries is no longer feasible in a
global age of information.
Over fifty countries have adopted
comprehensive laws to facilitate access and over thirty more are in the
process. The laws are broadly
similar, allowing for a general right by citizens, residents and often
anyone else to demand information from government bodies.
However, there is much work to be
done
Many of the laws are not adequate and promote access in name
only. In some countries the
laws lie dormant
In others,
the exemptions [for critical information and appeals processes and
oversight] are abused by governments. Older laws need updating to
reflect developments in society and technology. International
organizations have taken over the activities of national government but
have not subjected themselves to the same
rules. Access to information ebbs and
flows in any country but the transformation has begun and it is no longer
possible to tell citizens that they have no right to know."
"The Freedominfo.org global survey: Freedom of information and access to government record laws around the world", by David Banisar, May 2004, found at www.freedominfo.org . [emphasis added] An
excellent paper in a 2002 OECD survey of public sector transparency and
accountability further underscores the importance of this trend:
"Public scrutiny of
state affairs and access to information are key phases in the current
debate on the development of democracy
The two concepts are
interdependent, since one cannot play its part under the rule of law
without the other. There can
be no public scrutiny without access to information.
It is even possible
to conclude
that the
level of democracy attained by a country should now be measured in terms
of the volume and quality of the information in circulation.
it should now be
clear that it is not possible to fight corruption in the absence of a
culture of transparency.
Building such a culture can begin with a legislative commitment to
the public that breaks with the many years of concealment and the
persecution of those who take an interest in public affairs.
Legislation of this
type must overcome the huge temptation to control access to information as
a means of maintaining the conditions under which an authoritarian state
can achieve its objectives.
It must also overcome a culture of blatant isolation, behind which
administrations have long sheltered in an effort to avoid 'undesirable'
interference in their affairs." Alfredo Chirino Sαnchez, "The
right of access to information and public scrutiny: Transparency as a
democratic control instrument," in Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development, Public sector transparency and
accountability: Making it happen, OECD, Paris, 2002, pp. 163-166 [163, 166]. The "right to know"
and new important new transparency
tools are appearing in other ways on the global scene, as indicated
by the following articles. "A new report by a coalition of
environmental, labor and human rights groups, including the Sierra Club,
Oxfam, Amnesty International and the AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. labor
organization, argues for an international right to know. The groups
want large companies
that are traded on U.S. stock exchanges and have significant international
operations to be required to disclose information that could affect the
communities in which they operate.
The group's model is the registry
created by
the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release
Inventory.
The organizations also cite the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act as an example of a successful tool to
improve American business practices overseas. Globalization has brought new
scrutiny
[and the] groups are using lawsuits, good conduct labels and
public protests to force or shame companies into better behavior.
American companies could still
behave badly if they choose to do so.
But they would have to tell the
public about [their] practices, and let the market, and public opinion, go
to work. Companies and international trade
groups say the reporting requirements would be onerous. In fact, such disclosures would
pose very little burden on large companies, the only ones that would be
covered." "A global right to know," International Herald Tribune, January 24, 2003.
"In the world of international
relief agencies, it's known as 'the fog of disaster.' Brought on by
calamities,
getting the necessary donations to buy the right supplies and get them
to rescuers on the scene can be a bureaucratic nightmare. But [the the Red Cross
(IFRC)] has instituted a new
web-based technology designed to cut through the confusion and paperwork
of a crisis. [It]
. Can track donations of
money and supplies in real time
[and] allows aid groups to make an
instant and accurate accounting for every dollar a donor
gives. The software couldn't come at a
better time. According to the
World Disaster Report, 226 million people were hit by disasters in
2002. A study by the IFRC
shows that the software [can]
speed up the relief process by 20 to 30
percent." "Technology: Online relief," Newsweek International,
September 15, 2003.
"Should oil and mining firms be
made to fess up? Secrecy
clauses often forbid them to reveal details of contracts with developing
countries. That makes it all
too easy for crooked rulers to extract all sorts of 'facilitation
payments' from firms that, on the whole, would rather not pay
bribes.
This week [Britain's prime
minister, Tony Blair] chaired a conference, dubbed the Extractive
Industries Transparency Initiative, at which he called for a voluntary
agreement to disclose payments.
Several oil firms
made positive
noises. Yet transparency may come slowly.
If American oil firms do not comply, their European rivals are unlikely
to. Going public while your
competitors stay silent risks a backlash
The real villains are crooked
politicians in oil- and mineral-rich countries. It is government transparency --
both about what revenues are received and how they are spent -- that is
the enemy of such corruption.
This week, Mr. Blair offered British help [and money] to any
developing country willing to start a pilot scheme on disclosure. As George Soros has argued, a
better strategy would be to make such transparency a condition of IMF and
World Bank loans." "Oil and corruption: Shine a light," The Economist, June 21st, 2003.
Perhaps equally
important is a new trend in global affairs in which nations are assessed,
and more importantly ranked and compared on their performance in key
economic, social, and other areas.
Among the first such efforts were the Human Development Index of
the UNDP, which was introduced with its annual Human Development Reports
first published in 1990.
UNICEF has also provided substantive and analytical reports on
children's issues since 1983 in its annual report on the state of the
world's children, and other UN system agencies have developed such reports
as well. Human Development Report, United Nations Development Programme, (UNDP), since 1990, at www.undp.org/ , Publications, and The
State of the World's Children, United Nations Children's Fund,
(UNICEF), since 1983, available at www.unicef.org/ , Publications. But in the past
decade, and especially more recently, many NGOs, foundations, and
international organizations are jumping in as well. The trend to publicly assess
nations as a group is a very significant step towards international and
organizational transparency, by comparing them with each other and relying
on the public exposure (and pride in a good performance or shame at a bad
one) to encourage overall improvement. Current major efforts include the
following two, and IO Watch will eventually be adding considerably
more. -- An annual CGD/FP Commitment
to Development Index ranks 21 rich nations on how their policies -- from
aid to trade to environment and security -- help or hinder progress among
the world's poor countries (Denmark and the Netherlands are on top,
Australia and the USA climbed sharply, and Japan finishes
last.)
"Ranking
the rich", Foreign Policy, May/June 2004, pp. 46-56,
available
at -- An annual A.T.Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalization Index ranks 62 countries as "global nations" based on on personal, political, economic and technological factors. Available at www.foreignpolicy.com , and at www.atkearney.com .) One other very
important facet of transparency that greatly facilitates the "right to
know" must also be cited: clear and attractive visual and graphic
presentations, underscoring the old adage that "a picture is worth a
thousand words." The UN Secretariat
produces vast piles of reports, press releases, and formal records on its
activities each year, which provide a mixture of the tedious, the routine,
and the very important. But its reporting has one constant. It relies almost always on dry
bureaucratic and diplo-speak text, with only very limited or confusing
statistics and analyses, little analytical insight and context, and what
truly seems to be a visceral dislike (or fear) of charts and other
graphics.
It is extremely hard
for even the most dedicated UN admirers to understand the overall
situation and trends of UN operations from such textual documents. This verbiage is a great shame,
particularly in an age when excellent computer graphics can easily be
generated by almost any "desktop publishing" software to make a report
much more understandable, appealing, and attractive (and also much more
transparent, which may well be why the UN insists stubbornly on text,
text, and more text.) In contrast, the
Atlas of War and Peace provides a remarkably clean and clear
overview of worldwide and UN peacekeeping activities and aspects. With
extremely attractive and informative color graphics, it covers the
background, causes, participants, factors, and status of past and recent
conflicts globally and region by region. One can learn more about UN
peacekeeping from 30 minutes spent with this report than with hours spent
attempting to decipher even the best material that the UN Secretariat
provides. Dan
Smith, with Ane Brζin, The atlas of war and peace, Earthscan,
London, 2003.
Another excellent set
of presentations comes from the New Internationalist magazine,
which covers a topic of current worldwide interest each month (and has
done so for some 30 years). In a very recent issue on global religion, for
instance, it offers eight central factual elements in clear and colorful
graphics and carefully-chosen and succinct text, in only two pages, while
providing more up-to-date insight than months of concerted individual
research might uncover: "Alive and kicking: the
facts:
Faith in numbers
Rise and fall
With God on our side
Bloodiest hands
Humanitarianism
Social violence
Levels of belief
Holy lucre" "In
the name of God: The use and abuses of religion", New
Internationalist, No. 370, August 2004, pp. 18-19, available at
NI online, www.newint.org
. Other sets of
"knockout graphics" providing extensive, fresh, and significant new
insights into global problems can be found in Foreign Policy. Recent examples include a
presentation on the worldwide small arms trade, and -- as already
mentioned above -- those on the CGD/FP Commitment to Development Index
ranking 21 rich countries on multiple facets, and (perhaps most attractive
and insightful of all) the A.T.Kearney/Foreign Policy Globalization Index
ranking 62 countries. William Hartung and Rachel Stohl, "Hired Guns", Foreign Policy, May/June 2004, pp. 27-28, "Ranking the rich", Foreign Policy, May/June 2004, pp. 46-56, and "Measuring globalization", Foreign Policy, May/June 2005, pp.52-60. [Note: all three articles are available at www.foreignpolicy.com . The development index is also available at the Center for Global Development (at www.cgdev.org ) and the globalization index is also at www.atkearney.com . IO Watch will be looking for other
such useful and attractive presentations of UN-related issues. Meanwhile, comments on the
Atlas of war and peace by its reviewers demonstrate the high
informative qualities which this report possesses (and which many other
public reports, including especially those of the UN, should
provide): "It combines short, brutally clear
analysis of such topics as civil war and terrorism with maps and graphics
showing exactly what is going on around the
world." "The book's greatest strength is
the clear, if numbing, historical perspective it provides on the arms race
and the threat of nuclear war." "Arms sales, terrorism,
conscription, military advisers and nuclear accidents,
in easily
understood pictorial form
all its information is drawn from
authoritative sources." "A new kind of visual journalism
the authors deserve this year's Nobel Prize for Data Presentation
this
book comes with a flavour or originality hard to find in publishing
today." Review
quotes on previous editions of the Atlas from, respectively, The New
York Times, Publishers Weekly, Sunday Times (UK), and
The New Scientist, in Dan Smith, with Ane Brζin, The atlas of
war and peace, Earthscan, London, 2003.
As the many new
indices cited above indicate, much attention is now being given to
international comparisons among countries, and this of course means much
activity to develop meaningful and valid indicators of such
performance. Of particular
interest to this archive are comparisons of the quality of governance
(both among countries, and in the UN and other international
organizations.)
An excellent source of
research, analysis, and news on recent developments is provided by the
World Bank, which provides a "User's guide to governance indicators" --
their dimensions, their use in development research, process indicators,
and references and suggested readings. As the Bank's website
states: "New global standards of
governance are emerging.
Citizens of developing countries are demanding better performance
on the part of their governments, and they are increasingly aware of the
costs of poor management and corruption. Attitudes are also changing in
industrial countries where bribery is no longer viewed as a legitimate
cost of doing business overseas.
At the World Bank and other international agencies, scarce
resources must be allocated to governments that will use them most
effectively, and countries are asking for help in diagnosing governance
failures and in finding solutions.
These developments have led to new interest in measuring the
performance of governments, using indicators of governance and
institutional quality."
"Indicators of governance and Institutional Quality, World Bank,
at www1.world bank.org/public
sector/indicators.htm
.
Finally, and in accord
with these general "right to know" trends, initial comparative assessments
-- of accountability no less -- have also finally begun for international
organizations and the UN. The
One World Trust (UK) has a Global Accountability Project, which produced
the very first Global Accountability Report in 2003. The report rated 18
organizations, including inter-governmental organizations, transnational
corporations, and international NGOs (and included one UN unit, the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees.)
The report explains in its summary that: "This
report is the first of its
kind to compare the accountability of [IGOs, TNC's, and NGOs]. Eighteen of the world's most
powerful organisations are assessed in this pilot report. Scores are
provided for their performance in two aspects of accountability: member
control of governance structures and access to information. The results show wide differences
within and between the three groups, clearly indicating leaders in the
field and those that fall behind. Why does accountability
matter? The decisions [such organizations]
make affect all of our lives in many different ways;
Individuals and
communities who are affected by these organizations' actions should be
able to hold them to account.
However, few mechanisms have been identified at the global level to
enable these stakeholders to exert such a right. The result is a growing sense of
disenfranchisement
These organizations need to become more transparent
and accountable to their shareholders, both those internal and external to
the organisation, to enable wider participation in decision-making. This will increase their
legitimacy and lead to more effective
decision-making." Hetty
Kovach, Caroline Neligan, and Simon Burall, The global accountability
report 1 2003: Power without accountability?, The One World Trust,
Houses of Parliament, London,
2002/2003. www.oneworldtrust.org One can only hope that
all these trends toward transparent "sunshine" in the form of clear
information and analysis, easily understandable graphics, rankings and
indicators, and clear and understandable information for everyone
interested on the operations and performance of the UN will arrive sooner
rather than later.
However, the UN
problem in this area is not just extremely vague Secretariat reporting and
secrecy, nor the organization's distance from the global public. A clear
and painful example of the relentlessly-politicized UN was provided by the
Millennium Assembly festivities in 2000, where Secretary-General
Annan urged a gathering of 1,000 world spiritual leaders to speak out
against intolerance.
Unfortunately, he was also forced to explain that the UN had
excluded the Dalai Lama from the meeting because:
"this
house is really a house for the member states, and their sensitivities matter."
"UN spiritual talks to bar Dalai Lama", AFP, International Herald
Tribune, August 25 , 2000 . [Note: As futurist Alvin Toffler also noted, the UN "has been little more than a trade association of nation-states", in his Policy Shift: Knowledge, wealth, and violence at the edge of the 21st century, Basntam, New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland, 1990, p. 456. ] All nations obviously
have areas of good and bad performance, but at the UN the "sensitivities"
to any reporting and defective national performance seems too often to
generate indignation and attempts to suppress such analyses. (The
excellent UNDP Human Development Index seems the exception that proves the
rule, having overcome some serious opposition during its early years, and
apparently still not totally "out of the woods" as an open and annual
comparator of nation-state performance.) In this very important
area, the growing international right-to-know and an internet-linked world
are leading to more and more knowledgeable analyses of nations' and
organizations' performance. It appears that one must at least recognize
that political realities cripple, or certainly retard, the UN's overall
basic ability to make straightforward comparative -- or negative -- assessments and insights
concerning nation-states' (as well as its own) performance. Nevertheless,
transparency of information and frank outside analysis are the
cross-cutting theme of the various possible solutions to the UN's
entrenched non-accountability culture, which IO Watch discusses further in
the following subsection on Answers: A Starting
Point . Useful
Sources
Blanton, Thomas, "The world's right to know", Foreign
Policy, July-August 2002, pp. 50-58. Blanton, Thomas S., "Freedom of information: The right to know is gaining around the world", International Herald Tribune, October 11, 2003. "The Freedominfo.org global survey: Freedom of information and access to government record laws around the world", by David Banisar, May 2004, found at www.freedominfo.org . [emphasis added] Kovach, Hetty, Neligan,
Caroline, and Burall, Simon, The global accountability report 1 2003:
Power without accountability?, The One World Trust, Houses of
Parliament, London,
2002/2003, at www.oneworldtrust.org .
Stiles, Kendall W., "Civil society empowerment and multilateral donors: International institutions and new international norms", Global Governance 4 (1998), 199-216. Greider, William. Who will
tell the people: The betrayal of American democracy, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 1992.
Alleyne, Mark D.,
Global lies?: Propaganda, the UN and world order, Palgrave
Macmillan, New York, 2003. Smith,
Dan, with Braein, Ane, The
atlas of war and peace, Earthscan, London, 2003. The right to tell: The role of mass media in economic development, World Bank Development Studies, November, 2002. Rutherford, Paul,
Endless propaganda: The advertising of public goods, University of
Toronto, Canada,
2000. "Democracy's century: A survey of global
political change in the 20th century", Freedom House, December 7,
1999. www.freedominfo.org
Paul, Samuel, Holding the state to account: Citizen monitoring in action, Books for Change, Bangalore, India, 2002. Michael,
Bryane, and Bates, Michael, "Assessing international fiscal and monetary
transparency: The role of standards, knowledge management and project
design", International Public Management Journal, 6(2), 2003,
95-116. |
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