UNITED Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan today unveiled his blueprint for the most sweeping changes to the UN since the world body was founded after World War II. Driven in part by the bitter divisions over the United States-led war in Iraq, which he said had brought the world to a crossroads, Mr Annan wants national leaders to agree on an ambitious list of changes this year. Mr Annan's 63-page report calls to widen the membership of the Security Council — the UN's top organ for international security — and asks it to fix guidelines that would determine when nations may legally go to war. It asks nations to agree on a proposed definition of terrorism, which has been disputed for decades, establish a new human rights council and commit to ambitious goals on development, slashing poverty and building democracy. "In an era of global interdependence, the glue of common interest, if properly perceived, should bind all states together in this cause, as should the impulses of our common humanity," Mr Annan says in the report. "After a period of difficulty in international affairs, in the face of both new threats and old ones in new guises, there is a yearning in many quarters for a new consensus on which to base collective action.""This is a deal that the secretary general is offering the world," Annan's chief-of-staff Mark Malloch Brown said at UN headquarters in New York. "It's not an a la carte package. We believe the whole thing has to hold together." World leaders will hold a summit here in September, by which time Mr Annan is hoping most of the changes — including those contentious issues that have defied agreement for years — will be hammered out. "If it doesn't come to a head by that (summit), the fear is that it just drifts into another period without a deadline," Mr Malloch Brown said.
The main changes would have to be agreed by two thirds of the UN's 191-member nations as well as by the five veto-wielding permanent Security Council members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. It remains unclear how much political will exists for substantive change. But Mr Malloch Brown said momentum had been growing for sweeping reforms. "I think there is a huge support for the idea that it's time for a bold and practical deal of this kind," he said.
Mr Annan put forward two options for expanding Security Council membership from the present 15 to 24 nations — one of which would add new permanent members — and called for the creation of a peace-building commission. He also issued a call for a new human rights council to be elected by member states as part of an overall bid to stress that development, health and rights are essential factors in the freedom and security of peoples and nations. "Even if he can vote to choose his rulers, a young man with AIDS who cannot read or write and lives on the brink of starvation is not truly free," Mr Annan writes in the report's introduction. "Equally, even if she earns enough to live, a woman who lives in the shadow of daily violence and has not say in how her country is run is not truly free."
Though in the works for more than a year, the report comes with the UN buffeted by a series of high-profile scandals that has focused the spotlight on itsmismanagement. It also comes with Security Council nations at a deadlock over tackling the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, where UN officials say as many as 180,000 people have died in fighting between the Sudanese government and rebels.