By Otto Spijkers
Around this time (end of April) is the launch of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (UNPA) at the United Nations. Such an assembly, if established, would be the first parliamentary body directly representing the world’s citizens in the United Nations. The campaigners, led by the Committee for a Democratic United Nations, write that the UNPA "is envisaged as first practical step towards the long-term goal of a world parliament." Some big names, including Václav Havel and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, have subscribed to this idea, and so has the European Parliament (see para. 39 of this document). Why is this new Assembly necessary?
One could argue that today only governments are represented at the United Nations, and that the UN only protects the interests of governments, thereby neglecting the interests of individual people. I never really understand this argument. Aren’t these state representatives, assembled at the United Nations General Assembly, supposed to represent the interests and values of their people? And if some of these state representatives are not truly representing the interests and values of the people they supposedly represent, isn’t that generally due to a domestic democratic deficit as opposed to a global one? Of course, the United Nations should be able to intervene in order to save individuals from human rights violations committed against them by their own government, but that has nothing to do with a global democratic deficit in my opinion.
Kofi Annan tells us that
Even though the United Nations is an organization of states, the [UN] Charter is written in the name of "we the peoples". It reaffirms the dignity and worth of the human person, respect for human rights and the equal rights of men and women, and a commitment to social progress as measured by better standards of life, in freedom from want and fear alike. Ultimately, then, the United Nations exists for, and must serve, the needs and hopes of people everywhere.
It’s all about the values that one aims to protect collectively; if these values are about the individual’s well-being and not that of the state, then there is really no problem. It does not matter whether these values are promoted and realized by an assembly of state representatives or an assembly directly representing the people of the world.
But I guess UNPA deserves to be taken seriously. The main problem of the United Nations is that the world’s citizens do not consider the United Nations to be their organization. There’s too much of a distance. This is a problem that the United Nations has had since the beginning. It enticed the second Secretary-General, Mr. Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden, into making the following comment:
Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
The whole idea seems absurb to me, since the UN does not have the sort of sovereign power or jurisdiction that would make direct representation worthwhile (isn’t that the reason it operates through state representatives?) Such a parliament would still need the support of member states’ governments to enforce legislation domestically, and would need the regulatory and enforcement apparatus the UN currently lacks.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle for such a parliament would be the system of representation. The UN system currently is a strange kind of democracy of states – every state has an equal voice, except the states that just happened to win World War II. A parliamentary system would have to deal with how to represent a few Fijians versus thousands of Indians. Perhaps they would adopt a bicameral system like the US House of Representatives and Senate, with proportional representation and `jurisdictional’ representation?