Journal: What is the basis of the regional version of the Secretary General’s Security Council reform proposal? Is the UN trying to recognize regional Great Powers?

Mortimer: The Secretary General is quite careful not to lay down precisely what form the reforms will take. This is something that he thinks the member states have to decide among themselves. His point is essentially that the present composition of the Security Council effectively was decided in 1945 and was intended to reflect geo-political realities of that time. Its authority is being gradually eroded because people in the world feel that it is unrepresentative.

The Secretary General thinks that the reforms should take the geo-political realities of today into account, that they should give more representation to developing countries without making the Security Council less efficient or less able to make decisions. There is a certain tension between those objectives. He didn’t lay down specifically how the objectives should be reached. Instead he appointed a high-level panel of international experts – Brett Scowcroft was one of them, as you may know.

They came up with two models: Model A, which would have six new permanent members, one from Europe, two from Asia, one from Latin America, two from Africa. But, they would not have vetoes. Alternatively, you could have a category of semi-permanent members – countries that would be elected for four-year terms and then would re-eligible. At the moment, the nonpermanent members hold two-year terms and you cannot have two consecutive terms. So this would have sort-of-big powers or medium-sized powers, not already permanent members, elected by the membership to longer terms and if they perform well then that could be rolled over from four years to four years. It would be a sort of halfway house. The Secretary General has not opted between those two recommendations. He says that the membership should consider both and they should take a decision.

It would be better if it was taken by consensus, but as has been discussed for a long time now, if you can’t reach a consensus that shouldn’t be an excuse for not making a decision. You may know that to amend the charter of the United Nations, you need a two thirds majority, including the five existing permanent members of the Security Council. There could be a vote and indeed some countries are calling for a vote, as early as May or June. The Secretary General thinks if that’s the only way to do it, it is better to do it by a vote then not do it at all.

Journal: What is Kofi Annan like?

Mortimer: He is a very nice, gentle person, maybe even too nice. Sometimes he forgets that he is the Secretary General and perhaps doesn’t turn people down when perhaps he should. He has a way of making you feel at ease and that he is on your side, which I think is a very important quality in a Secretary General. In fact, he has a paperweight on his desk that says “The key to being a diplomat is letting the other guy have it your way.”

Journal: What is the basis for choosing Security Council seats by continent?

Mortimer: I think that obviously the whole idea of the United Nations is based on geographical balance. It says that even in the Charter in Article 101, or something, that they should be chosen on merit, but also with regard for geographical balance.

[Consults tattered pocket UN Charter]

Yeah, it’s Article 101, that’s right: “Paramount consideration should be given to in the employment of the staff and in the determination of the conditions of service shall be the necessity of securing the highest standards of efficiency, competence, and integrity. Due regard shall be paid to the importance of recruiting the staff on as wide a geographical basis as possible.” That’s something I think everyone recognizes as important - that all the different parts of the world should feel represented and that they have a say in the United Nations.

If you want to be specific, there were certain countries considered to have a right to be permanent members, but they needed to find a formula – they didn’t want to name the country. They rather cleverly found a formula which sort of balanced. It would allow for Germany, India, Brazil, Japan, and… two countries in Africa.

Journal: What are the likely results of China’s current reaction to the Japanese UN bid?

Mortimer: I think that there candidates for membership about which some other countries have strong reservations. As usual, China has reservations about Japan, Pakistan has reservations about India, the U.S. has reservations about Germany. I think some Latin American countries have reservations about Brazil. I think that is probably the reason why there are two options on the table. The membership is going to have to make up their mind.

It is no secret that China isn’t very comfortable with Japan becoming a permanent member. On the other hand, they seem to be now quite happy with the idea of India becoming a permanent member. The United States have spoken in favor of Japan becoming a permanent member, although they haven’t committed themselves on Germany. If a member actually imposes a veto, then it may be blocking the countries it wants to block, but it also may be causing great annoyance to other countries with which it wants to keep good relations.

My hunch is that the U.S., China, and Russia would probably be quite happy not to have any new permanent members but none of them want to cast the veto preventing that. I think that with two-thirds of the membership in favor of any given proposal, any of the permanent members would think very carefully before vetoing it. It’s a pretty invidious position to put yourself in to say “well, I am the country that is going to stand in the way of what two thirds of the members of the United Nations want”.

There is a lot of maneuvering going on. Everybody is claiming that the most number of countries is committed to their point of view. Its something like opinion polls: you add them up and they come to more than the total. So obviously some countries are being quite coy about which way they would vote if it came to a vote, saying certain things to people on both sides of the argument.

Journal: What would happen if a vote doesn’t end up working come September?

Mortimer: There would be no agreement. It’s the way of the United Nations – everyone has to decide what their priorities are and it may be that you can get some of these other reforms without that one. But I think that a lot of people see a reform here which most of the world wants, it’s been in discussion for a long time. There’s probably a better chance of doing it now than there has been in some years or than there’s likely to be for some years. So, I’m certainly very much impressed with the way this argument has come alive. A year ago people would have said to you, “oh Security Council reform, we’ll be arguing about that until 3005”. This may even turn out to be true, but now a large number of countries are considering it very seriously and they are behaving as though they expect to see it.

Journal: How will the proposal for the new human rights commission affect the UN’s ability to respond to human rights crises? Would there have been a different result in Darfur?

Mortimer: In Darfur, it is probably as much up to the Security Council as it is to the Human Rights Commission. The Security Council has been very slow to accept its responsibility, but I think things have improved. They have now agreed to impose sanctions on the people responsible for human rights in Darfur and to refer the situation there to the International Criminal Court. There are 51 or 52 people who were identified by an international commission, which the Secretary General has handed over to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. And I think there is a general agreement that the African Union force on the ground should be strengthened, both in numbers and in its mobility and its capacity. Where there are actually African Union forces, people are safer, but there are not nearly enough. It’s a very large territory.

The power is in the Security Council and in organizations that have military capacity, like NATO and maybe the European Union now. They would have to be prepared to do more and to enable the African Union has to spell out what exactly it needs. But I think we’re moving in the right direction. For the Human Rights Commission, the Secretary General is proposing is that it be replaced by a council; a higher-level body. It would be directly elected by the General Assembly, unlike the present commission which is elected by the Economic and Social Council, making it sort of a third-order body. The present commission only sits six weeks of every year, the Secretary General is suggesting a sort of permanent existing body which could meet any time to deal with a crisis. Instead of just picking a few cases to discuss, which tends to be done very much on political grounds, and also in a kind of tit-for-tat way – you point your finger at me, so I’ll point a finger at you – they should really review how all members of the United Nations are living up to their human rights obligations.

But that’s not going to limit confrontation. I think human rights is always going to be a sensitive subject. There will continue to be some serious arguments, but these need to be conducted on a more objective basis, unlike the very subjective and arbitrary way that it is now being done.

Journal: Would it continue to have the element of thematic reports, or would it only report on specific countries?

Mortimer: It would continue to do both. I don’t think that there is any objection to that aspect of the Commission’s work. The intergovernmental aspect, that the countries represented and the way they interpret their mandates, is a source of concern. I am not saying that all the Special Rapporteurs are of equal quality. There are some who produce quite provocative reports, but I think that having an expert who is not nominated by any one government but has a mandate to perform for the United Nations most would agree is very useful.

Journal: And the Commission members would all be democracies?

Mortimer: It would be very difficult to have actual criteria for membership. I think that supposedly any country that runs for membership should undertake to observe human rights and I think that the members, in deciding which countries to vote for, try to consider how those countries fared in the review process. That’s one of the virtues of having a review process for all of the countries. One shouldn’t make what he is trying to create is a sort of club of the virtuous, that we’re the goody-goody countries and we’re going to sit in judgment on the rest of you. I think there has to be a recognition that nobody is perfect, that sometimes human rights are not observed because of ill will, but also because of a lack of capacity by the country or government concerned. We should all try to help each other raise the standards of human rights. It should be in that spirit that countries offer to serve on the new council, if they agree to create a new council.

Journal: Has U.S. pressure affected the UN’s definition of state sovereignty versus individual rights?

Mortimer: I don’t think it has been only the U.S., this is something that has changed with the times. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, states were very powerful, it might have been the peak of the power of states vis-à-vis citizens. War has tendency to deliver power to the states because, well, nobody likes war being conducted by private citizens or private companies. It’s the one thing that even libertarians are willing to concede to the states. If there is going to be war it should be the state that declares and wages war. By the mid-twentieth century, war required a total effort from a society and kind of licensing the state to organize many aspects of life. That’s one of the reasons why states, in 1945, were so powerful. The main problem of international order seemed to be regulating the relations between states. Although if you read the Charter, even then you will see that quite a lot of attention was given to human rights, to individual rights. You had Hitler’s Germany, which had completely trampled on individual rights.

But certainly if we look at what happened in the 60 years since then, international life has become much, much more complicated. In 1945, if I wanted to cross the frontier of course I would need a passport; now in many parts of the European Union I don’t. There might not even be anybody at the frontier to stop me. Even in the late ’60s and early ’70s, if I wanted to travel outside the United Kingdom, I remember that when to buy foreign currency I would have to have the amount of foreign currency I bought stamped on my passport - it was rationed by the government. I don’t think there’s any way a government could do that now. All I have to do is get out my keyboard and press a few buttons, and if I have millions of dollars, millions of dollars would go round the world before you could cross this room. So it’s a very different kind of world we’re living in now. The media also, sending images around the world in a matter of seconds. We could see the Cardinal coming out and announcing the new Pope at that same time as the people in St. Peter’s Square.

The most unfortunate parts of the world states are, by and large, weak or where they have collapsed. That’s where you find banditry, civil war, sometimes genocide. The state is still important, but it is not enough to regulate the relations between states. There needs to be some sort of role in international affairs for the private sector, for civil society, and there must be concern for people and not just governments. That’s why one of the reforms the Secretary General is advocating is that more countries accept responsibility to protect their citizens. If you have a case where the state is clearly failing to do that, people are being massacred in large numbers, or ethnically cleansed or whatever, then there is a responsibility of the international community as a whole. The body that really should be assuming that responsibility on behalf of the international community is the Security Council because under the Charter it has the primary responsibility for international peace.

Journal: There’s talk of ending the peacekeeping missions in the former Yugoslavia and replacing them with EU membership. Does the UN believe that will work?

Mortimer: I can’t say exactly what the UN believes because it would have to be the subject of specific decisions by intergovernmental bodies. I wouldn’t say that the Secretariat has a settled view on that question; I think it is probably a matter of phasing. As a matter of fact, the UN is no longer playing a role in Bosnia. The European Union has taken over. Only in Kosovo is there still a UN administration, because there is no agreement on the eventual political status of Kosovo. As you know, most of the population there wants it to be an independent state, but the minority wants it to remain part of Serbia and Montenegro (or Serbia, without Montenegro). The Security Council, and the international community has not formed a definitive view on that yet. It is a problem that needs to be addressed.

Once you’ve decided which states are sovereign in the Balkans, should they become members of the European Union? The European Union seems to have the role of absorbing that part of Europe, and most of the people in those states would like to in due course, be members of the European Union. But there are a lot of constraints and a lot of requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to function as a member of the European Union, so this isn’t something that will; necessarily happen quickly. I think it may take a varying amount of time. Of course, Slovenia, which was part of Yugoslavia, is already a part of the European Union. Perhaps Croatia will be the next one ready.

But this is not really my business as the UN. As a European I am very interested. As a journalist, before I was a UN official, I used to cover that part of the world quite a lot. I do think that European integration is in the long term a very important factor for stability in that part of the world. The UN is never happier than when it doesn’t have to worry about a certain part of the world.Insofar as the European Union and NATO stabilizing a part of the world previously very unstable, and there is less for the UN to do, nobody could be happier than us.

Journal: How did Kofi Annan react to charges of wrongdoing levelled against his son?

Mortimer: It is clear that the committee that is looking into the Oil-For-Food scandal is not satisfied with all the answers it got from Kojo Annan on some issues, particularly about how much money he was receiving, and so they would like to further interview him. It seems that he didn’t keep his father fully in the picture about this relationship, and his father thought that he would work for this company up until the end of 1998, and then he quit. It then turned out that in fact Kojo had continued to receive money from them under various headings. As the Secretary General said, he was surprised and disappointed when he found out. It is obviously unpleasant for any parent to find that your child hasn’t been completely straight with you.

Journal: Is the current reform tour a response to charges that the UN has become less relevant because of recent events including the Iraq war?

Mortimer: I don’t think that it has become less relevant. There are ways in which it could be more relevant and ways in which it might become less relevant if it is not changed. In some respects the Iraq crisis is a crisis of expectations, because if you think about it, certain people were disappointed in the UN. For one, people who supported the war were disappointed because they thought that it was a war fought to enforce Security Council resolutions and that the Security Council didn’t agree to enforce its own resolutions. In the other category, probably more numerous in the world as a whole, was the view that this was a war that was not authorized by the Security Council, and were disappointed that the UN was not able to stop it.

If you look back at the history of the UN, you would see that it would say well actually the Security Council’s record of enforcing its own resolutions is not that good. Also regarding the UN’s record of preventing wars, although it is difficult to know for sure whether you’ve prevented something, the UN certainly has not prevented all wars. There have been quite a lot of wars during the UN’s existence. It’s interesting that people on both sides of this argument seem to expect the UN to deliver this time. Their frustration in a way is a reflection of that expectation. The Secretary General’s reaction is to identify our conflicting expectations.

Maybe we should think it harder about what we expect from the United Nations, and what we expect from each other, particularly about the rules involving use of force. The right of self-defense is pretty clear to most people. You probably know Article 51 of the Charter says if there is an armed attack against a member of the United Nations, that state has an inherent right of self-defense, at least until the Security Council deals with the matter. Most lawyers think would say that doesn’t mean you literally have to wait until the other side has fired the first shot. If it is clear that an attack is imminent you can make a preemptive strike. An example many people cite is Israel in 1967, when Israel actually fired the first shot but most people don’t feel that Israel was the aggressor. It’s another thing when you say “I think there’s somebody a long way away who may be planning to attack me, or may be developing weapons which could be used to attack me, or may be giving weapons to non-state actors who might attack me”. And I think that probably most of the UN membership would feel, in such a case, what is needed is a collective decision, rather than one state sending its armed forces halfway around the world to deal with it, because then it becomes very easy for almost any state to use that kind of pretext. In a way that takes us back to the kind of world we had before the UN was set up.

In this report of the high-level panel, they suggested some guidelines or criteria for use of force and when the Security Council should authorize or mandate the use of force by member states. The Secretary General has been very cautious in his own report. All he has done has been to list these basic principles and say that the Security Council should perhaps pass a resolution setting out these principles and expressing its desire or intention to be guided by them when faces that kind of decision. It seems that the United States is not happy with even that, so I don’t know whether such a resolution will be passed. Maybe not in the near future. We’ll see.

Journal: Are there opportunities in UN reform to restart work on the Millennium Goals?

Mortimer: Well I think that the Millennium Goals, by and large, are not things that can be done by the UN. They can be done by an institution. We are talking about massive changes in the society of developing countries. A lot of the work has to be done by the people and the governments in those developing countries. But, what most people who have really studied the issue recognize is that quite a large number of developing countries, especially in Africa, are not going to be able to do it by themselves. They do have to adopt the right policies and the right priorities, but they also need help from the outside world, in the form of financial assistance, reasonable trading arrangements, debt forgiveness. Generally, they need help building up their capacity. There can be a sort of perfect level playing field for trade, but some of these countries, without the basic infrastructure in place, and without settlement of some on-going conflicts, cannot produce anything to export. The idea that everybody can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps is not quite true. These countries need an international system which is supportive.

That’s really what that part of the Secretary General’s report is about. It suggests, for instance, that all donor countries commit themselves 0.7% target for Gross National Income to Official Development Assistance. Most of them will take some time to get up to that level, but since the MDGs are meant to happen in 2015, you need a kind of front-loading mechanism, something like what Gordon Brown has suggested: an international finance facility. You need some quick wins. You could pick a few areas, like one is providing chemically treated bed nets for kids in Africa which could save millions of lives from malaria. That’s something that’s relatively cheap, and it could be done like in a year. And you also need to fast track certain things, and you could find more than you probably think, countries that have got the right policies in place now. You should make sure they get the aid straightaway. And that can have a sort of exemplary effect. If you can show that it can work in the countries that have the rights policies, then this will encourage others to do it. So these are the kind of things, so it is not mainly about the institutions of the UN. It is about getting governments and companies, maybe also the international financial institutions, regional development banks, and so on, and governments and civil society in developing countries to agree on their priorities and act on them.