You Pay, We Decide: the Dysfunctional U.N. General Assembly

It is rare that the U.S., Japan, Europe AND the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan all agree on something, but here it is. The aforesaid countries, plus the S-G, are locked in a serious struggle with a group of 77 developing countries over control of the U.N. budget. (See here for Amb. Bolton’s summary of the problems)



The developed countries want the Secretariat to have more control over the allocation of funds, free from constant oversight by a General Assembly committee dominated by developing countries. This is part of the U.N. reform plan, which transfers more authority to the S-G but imposes all sorts of oversight.



Although it easy to criticize the U.N. as a single institution, it is in fact a bunch of separate sub-institutions as well which have different characteristics. One of the most consistently dysfunctional subinstitutions of the U.N. is the General Assembly (with the U.N. Secretariat running a close second). As I noted earlier, the one-vote, one-country principle in the GA is largely responsible for things like Sudan sitting on the Human Rights Commission and Iran sitting on the Disarmanent Commission. As GA institutions, the larger powers have no greater authority than the smaller ones.



The large powers’ main leverage over the GA is the fact that the U.S., Japan, and Europe contribute about 80% of the U.N.’s whole budget. But the GA still controls (to some degree) how that money is spent. Until someone other than the GA gets control over how that money is allocated, we won’t be seeing any serious reform of the U.N. anytime soon.