The Future of The United Nations - Essay Example

The Future Of United Nations By [Your College The United Nations (UN) is an international organization which aims to facilitate law, economic welfare, equivalent human rights and international security within member states, with the ultimate objective of achieving peace throughout the world. A question which many people raise when it comes to UN is if the organisation removes individual sovereignity and, if it does, then does it even have the powers to do that. To consider this issue we first need to figure out what the word sovereignity actually means.

Sovereignity is generally defined as "Responbibility. The primary responsibility for a state is to provide protection to people within the state itself" (International Commission On Intervention And State Sovereignty 2001).Sovereignty is more then just an emblem or measure of international relations between countries. The UN does not remove sovereignty of member countries, however it takes steps to make sure the overall the UN member countries stay sovereign. It does that by assisting countries whenever an event comes up which somehow or the other effects their sovereignty (International Commission On Intervention And State Sovereignty 2001).

Just to quote a recent example, Iraq and Afghanistan were proving a threat to the international community at large. Media reports claimed that the two countries possessed weapons of mass destruction and their rulers were tyrants, wanting to cause harm to their country men by taking innocent lives. The UN taking notice of the security concern, deployed its peave making force in these two countries with the aim to protect its member state from being affected anyhow by these "weapons of mass destruction" (Thakur 2001).

Another very important question after the September 2011 terrorist attacks has been how should the United Nation handle "intervention calls" for human protection purposes. Interventing on humanitarian grounds has always been a very controversial topic. The Rwanda incident of 1994 is often remembered as a landmark event where UN intervention could have prevented mass genocide, but the failure of international will to intervene lead to one of the greatest human catastrophes ever.The demand for interventions has been raised by many states however the UN has not been able to service all these demands.

Reasons have been various by the former UN secretary general once put it down really well in words. He said “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault of sovereignty, how should we respond to Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systematic violations of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?” (Williams 1998).If we think over it there are a lot of facts which need to be considered before deciding to intervene. First of all there needs to be consent amongst between the permanent member states of the UN if the UN is to proceed with intervention of humanitarian grounds.

Secondly, UN’s budget is also a constraining factors since it’s sponsored by a lot of governments around the world. At the end of the day, it can be said that in the recent past, the UN has very well handled intervention for human protection purposes throughout the world. I give my view on the recent involvement of the UN peace keeping force in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan (Williamson 1998).UN’s intervention in Kosovo and Bosnia bought the dilemma of intervention for human purposes to an all time high.

The Kosovo intervention was considered very controversial as it raised daunting questions about the genuineness of the case for military intervention in the country. People often say that the offences committed by the Belgrade authorities weren’t sufficiently serious to demand foreign intervention in the face of UN and NATO. Other believe that had the NATO not intervened in the operations of the country, Kosovo would have been in a much better state.The Bosnian dilemma also depicted a very bad image of the UN throughout the world.

The case demanded serious intervention which could have prevented a massacred of thousands of people, but failure by the UN to interfere left thousands dead and scores injured (Gorman 2001).ReferencesINTERNATIONAL COMMISSION ON INTERVENTION AND STATE SOVEREIGNTY, EVANS, G. J., & SAHNOUN, M. (2001). The responsibility to protect report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Ottawa, International Development Research Centre. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10119691.GORMAN, R. F. (2001).

 Great debates at the United Nations: an encyclopedia of fifty key issues 1945-2000. Westport, Conn, Greenwood Press.THAKUR, R. C., & SCHNABEL, A. (2001). United Nations peacekeeping operations: ad hoc missions, permanent engagement. Tokyo, United Nations University Press.WILLIAMS, M. C. (1998). Civil-military relations and peacekeeping. Oxford, Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies.WILLIAMSON, R. (1998). Some corner of a foreign field: intervention and world order.

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