The United Nations ended an uneventful year with no firm decisions on several politically sensitive issues, including the reform of the Security Council, the creation of a new Human Rights Council and the revitalisation of the Secretariat’s management structure.

“If there’s one thing I would like to hand over to my successor when I leave office next year, is that it should be a United Nations that is fit for the many varied tasks and challenges we are asked to take on today,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said recently. But will a lame-duck Annan succeed in restructuring the world body before he steps down in December 2006?

According to Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, “2006 will be a crucial year in determining whether the United Nations can reclaim its role as an independent actor on the world scene, or whether the virulent US choice of either sidelining or undermining the global organisation will prevail.” She pointed out that while the United Nations has “great potential”, it also faces “huge dangers”. But there is also the danger that the new regulations could be used to encourage staffers with an anti-UN bias to turn on the United Nations, said Bennis, author of Challenging Empire: How People, Governments and the UN Defy US Power.

A sharply divided world body could boast only two significant political victories in 2005: the creation of a UN Peacebuilding Commission and the establishment of a new and improved Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF).

The Peacebuilding Commission is expected to assist countries emerging from conflict to achieve sustainable peace, while the CERF is aimed at rushing urgently needed resources to countries hit by humanitarian and natural disasters. Annan says he is hoping that member states will agree not only on an “effective and impartial” Human Rights Council (HRC), but also on a package of management reforms, which will be ready in February.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, says negotiations on the proposed HRC “are being held hostage by repressive regimes that want to impede real reform”.

Although he did not identify any countries by name, Neuer said “their idea of reform would be a change in name only or, worse, the creation of an even less effective body”. But he said that the majority of UN member states need to find the political will to defy these spoilers and create a credible, effective Council made up only of states with solid records of commitment to the highest human rights standards.

Perhaps the biggest single disappointment was the failure of member states to agree on a proposed expansion of the 15-member Security Council. Bennis says that Security Council reform, “long assumed to mean expansion of Council membership and perhaps constraints on the veto powers of the Permanent Five, is off the agenda”.

The new whistleblower protection policy is a step in the right direction, and the secretary-general has asked member states to approve further important changes, in particular the creation of an independent ethics office and an independent oversight committee. Additional reform proposals and the results of the review, requested by the World Summit, of all UN programmes that are over five years old to identify outdated and unnecessary ones are expected in February. — IPS