Policy Podcast: Working With the United Nations on Global Issues

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MR. MCCORMACK: Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs Kristen Silverberg, thank you for joining us this morning.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: Thank you for having me.

MR. MCCORMACK: Let me start by asking you a question about the UN. You know, I get this all the time from the – you know, from – you know, blog entries and in the media. How is the UN useful to the United States? How do we use the UN? Why does it matter to our foreign policy?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: I think – I think one important thing to keep in mind is the diversity of the UN system. You know, a lot of people think of the UN as one monolith, that it’s just one big institution.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: And in fact, the UN is this amazing diversity of organization. It includes all of the five main organs of the UN system, including the Security Council, all of the agencies and funds and programs. So everything from the World Food Program, which helps to feed about 100 million people a year, especially in Africa; the Security Council, which helps to address international peace and security crises; and the many, many other organizations. So we are really -- we work with the UN on everything from peace and security, to development, to humanitarian issues, to healthcare, really across the board.

MR. MCCORMACK: So is it safe to say that the UN is able to do some things in terms of delivery of aid or organizing the international system to accomplish a goal that, say, we might not be able to do ourselves, or it’s more efficient to work through the UN?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: I think there are a lot of things to be said about it. One is it helps us -- really helps leverage U.S. resources and also culling the resources of other countries. So for something like the World Food Program or our efforts on avian influenza through the World Health Organization, we are working together with many other countries in a way that’s much more effective and efficient than if we tried to do this -- address a transnational challenge -- on our own.

The other is that it comes -- for a lot of countries, the UN comes with a legitimacy that the actions of an individual country wouldn't. And so when the UN condemns the human rights conditions within Iran --

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: -- that’s not just the U.S., that’s the full General Assembly saying that conditions in Iran are unacceptable, that the people of Iran deserve a lot better then they’re getting.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right. The flip side to that is UN management reform. I know that’s something that you’ve been working on for the past couple of years. Talk to us a little bit about the why. Why do we need this? Is this just a case of tweaking at the edges, or you need something more fundamental? And where do we stand in those efforts?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: Well, you know, I think one important thing to keep in mind about the UN is that it’s really only as good as its member-states.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: The upside to the UN is that this near universality, that it speaks with the voice of the international community. The downside is that it speaks with the voice of the full international community, including some really irresponsible actors who bring their irresponsible government policies into the UN system. And so that means lots of different things. It means opposition to meaningful human rights issues and it sometimes means some really bad management practices, including things that can allow for corruption and fraud and mismanagement.

So we’ve been really focusing on transparency in the UN system and making sure that member-states have access to internal audits, that we have very high financial disclosure standards, that we have an effective ethics office, that we have independent oversight of UN function. And I think, slowly, we’re making progress on all those issues, but it’s requiring an enormous amount of leadership from the U.S. and really persistent effort.

MR. MCCORMACK: And how has UN Secretary General Ban been on these management reforms?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: I think, on the whole, he’s been quite good. He’s clearly set the standard for an ethical United Nations. He, in fact, disclosed his own financial records voluntarily early on and called on all of the UN staff to do that. And I think he’s helped to address some of these issues. We haven’t agreed with everything he’s done on the UN reform side, and, of course, some of his reforms have been very expensive, which in a time of tight budgets poses some difficulties.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: But, on the whole, we’re very supportive of his efforts.

MR. MCCORMACK: Let me switch to a few specific topics now that we’re working with the UN -- on which we’re working with the UN. Darfur, the deployment of the UN peacekeeping forces, this is a lot in the news recently. Where do we stand on that?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: The deployment is going a lot more slowly than we had hoped. So we have a force commander on the ground along with a joint special representative, and they have about 7,000 troops on the ground. Largely, the troops -- about the same as when the African Union was in charge.

And I think there are a lot of reasons for the slowness of the deployment. One is the Government of Sudan, which has set up some both minor and very serious obstacles to deployment. And so we’re working, especially our special envoy Rich Williamson is working, to address those. Some of the problems have been in the UN with DPKO, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, not taking the decisions as quickly and efficiently as they need to. And some of the problems, to be honest, have been the responsibility of member-states, of troop contributors in failing to come up with some of the resources that the force needs to be able to do its job the right way. So things like helicopters for heavy transport.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right. Let me focus on the resource issue for a second. Have you found that this is a matter of will, like they’re not willing to cough up the resources, or they just aren’t there, they don’t have the helicopters or it’s hard to find them?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: I think it’s a little bit of both. I think sometimes it’s lack of prioritization within countries, and that’s something that U.S. leadership can really help to address, explaining to countries the importance of commitment to addressing a problem like this in Sudan. And I think some of it is that these are countries that are stretched. This is a time when a lot of demands are being put on the international community to address other problems in Africa, problems around the world. And so, really, there are a lot of reasons for this, but we think it’s important to prioritize an issue like ending a genocide.

MR. MCCORMACK: Let me switch to Lebanon. I know it’s something we’ve been working on for a couple years now is forming this tribunal to bring to justice those responsible for murdering former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri. Where do we stand on that?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: Well, I was just in The Hague last week to check on status of the tribunal, and it’s moving ahead at about the pace we’d expect. They now have a headquarters agreement with the Dutch that will outline all of the ways this tribunal will move forward. The judges have been selected, although they have not been publicly announced. The prosecutor has been selected. And so, really, we’re moving ahead, I think, pretty methodically to try to get this tribunal set up.

This is a very complicated investigation. The investigation started, really, shortly after the assassination in 2005. But as we’ve seen from other cases of terrorism, this is going to take a while to make sure it’s -- we have a -- take a good case to trial. And so the UN is working, I think, really diligently to make sure that happens.

MR. MCCORMACK: Is the investigator still working on the case? Has he made -- has he come to any public conclusions yet about who’s responsible?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: At different points in the investigation, the various investigators have reported on, really, in the abstract, on some theories of the case or some really broad conclusions, but they have not listed suspects. They haven’t indicated when they’re going to take this to an actual trial. And I think it’s appropriate that they’re doing this confidentially, keeping -- really, this is -- to make sure this happens professionally in the right way, the investigators need to be able to have that kind of investigation. So, of course, we’re pressing them that it should go to trial when they’re ready.

MR. MCCORMACK: Another topic, human rights at the United Nations. I think it’s -- is it the newest body within the United Nations, the Human Rights Council? I don’t think we’ve had too many good things to say about the Human Rights Council.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: No. Yeah.

MR. MCCORMACK: What are they doing and why is it that we have been so critical of it?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: Well, you know, this was the body that was set up to replace the old Human Rights Commission and was meant to really restore the UN’s credibility on human rights issues. And as I was saying before, there are a lot of irresponsible actors within the UN system who would prefer that the UN not take any decisions that are critical of human rights offenders, and we think it’s so important that the UN really maintain a strong voice on these issues.

We’ve been disappointed that the council has really neglected its mandate to take on critical human rights problems. Instead, it’s done a lot of Israel-bashing, a lot of focus on those issues. It’s eliminated special rapporteurs who are meant to focus on human rights in Belarus and Cuba, and gave those governments, we thought, a really undeserved victory.

And so we’ve been working with our partners in Europe and Latin America, Asia and Africa to try to improve the situation at the Human Rights Council, but I can’t say that we have had a lot of success to date. We’ve very discouraged by it.

MR. MCCORMACK: What’s our strategy been to try to work from within the Human Rights Council, joining up or running for membership, or to try to work from the outside to change it?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: We have decided -- the Secretary decided early on that we could not run for membership of the council, that it really, it seemed to us that our efforts were better spent in other directions and that, really, we ought to sit out the council until we saw a dramatic improvement. And as I said, we haven’t seen that.

We have been active in Geneva, though, with encouraging the countries with strong human rights records to take tough decisions on the council. We’ve been very active in informal meetings. And so I would expect that kind of thing to continue, but we don’t plan to run anytime in the near future.

MR. MCCORMACK: Okay, we’re going to have to wrap it up there. Thanks very much for joining us again.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY SILVERBERG: Thank you very much.