Wednesday, February 8, 2012

United Nations

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 sets a common standard to ensure that all human beings are treated equally. The United Nations has advanced and supported democracy and democractic goverance through electoral assistance provided to over 50 countries since 2010 alone. The UN has assisted in milestone elections in many countries, including Afghanistan, Burundi, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, and Timor-Leste. The United Nations has formulated more than 80 treaties and declarations protecting and promoting human rights, for example, banning the participation of children under 18 in armed conflict and prohibiting the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography.

8 comments:

  1. How much does the United Nations cost?

    In 2012, the annual regular budget of the UN Secretariat is $2.6 billion; in 2011, the annual regular budget of the entire UN system was $9.2 billion. To put these figures in perspective, consider that the annual budget of the Canadian province of British Columbia is around $40 billion. That of the city of Jakarta is $3.2 billion, of Helsinki $5.6 billion, of Tokyo $81.3 billion. Harvard University’s annual operating budget is $3.7 billion. The annual budget authority of the US Department of Agriculture is $145 billion.

    The United States pays around $582 million for the regular budget of the UN Secretariat and $1.9 billion for peacekeeping operations, which due to their nature are separately budgeted. Japan pays about $295 million for the regular budget and $1.1 billion for peacekeeping; Germany pays around $188 million for the regular budget and $566 million for peacekeeping; and the United Kingdom pays about $155 million for the regular budget and $575 million for peacekeeping. All that means the UN costs some $11.70 per year for each British citizen, $9.20 per year for each German citizen, $8.50 per year for each Japanese citizen and $8.00 per year for each United States citizen. On the whole, it amounts to about $1.30 per person on Planet Earth per year. In 2008, average household spending on lotteries was about $525 a year in the United States. In 2010, Italians spent $83 billion on lotteries.

    For the United States, out of every tax dollar collected, around 34 cents goes to Social Security and Medicare, 22 cents to national defense and security, and 5 cents to paying interest on the national debt. Just one-tenth of a single penny goes to pay UN dues.

    The two main factors accounting for the doubling of the regular, US-dollar based budget of the UN Secretariat over the past decade—from $1.25 billion per year in the year 2001 to $2.6 billion in 2012—are, first and foremost, inflation and the weakening of the US dollar (50%), on one hand, and, on the other, growth in Special Political Missions, mandated by Member States, that oversee longer-term peace-building activities around the world (38%). Increased oversight and security requirements and expansion of other mandates given, especially those related to the administration of justice and human rights, account for most of the remainder.

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  2. Is the United Nations a world government?

    The United Nations is a voluntary organization of 193 sovereign States that come together to solve common problems—from peace and security to humanitarian emergencies, disease, climate change, poverty, hunger, human rights abuses, and international crime. The United Nations cannot and does not act without the consent and direction of its Member States, which set the agenda, determine the budget, provide all funding and monitor all activities, as well as supply all police and military forces.



    What does the United Nations have to do with people’s everyday lives?

    That depends on where you live. Every day, almost everywhere, you can make a telephone call, watch TV or use the Internet because the United Nations develops the technical standards that allow global networks and technologies to seamlessly interconnect. You can board a flight because the United Nations sets international standards and regulations for aviation safety, security, efficiency and regularity. You can buy safe foodstuffs and rely on your pharmacy because the United Nations maintains international standards, codes of practice, guidelines and recommendations for medication.—For those in dire need, at any given time, the United Nations has 30 ships at sea, 70 aircraft in the sky and 5,000 trucks on the ground, moving more than 5 million metric tons of food per year to some 90 million beneficiaries in 73 countries. At this moment, some 120,000 men and women from 114 countries are serving in 15 peacekeeping operations around the globe. The UN assists some 36.4 million refugees in 123 countries, providing food, shelter, medical aid, education and repatriation assistance. In some 30 countries, the UN is leading efforts to clear landmines and the explosive remnants of war, teaching people how to stay out of harm’s way, and aiding victims in becoming self-sufficient.



    Is the United Nations a sprawling bureaucracy?

    The UN Secretariat has some 44,000 staff members. Over half of these are working in field operations, and less than 15% are stationed at Headquarters in New York. Since the rest of the UN system includes some 31,000 staff members, this makes for a total of 75,000 persons working in every corner of the globe for peace and security, development, the environment, humanitarian assistance, human rights, health, food and nutrition—among many other areas of activity. By comparison, the entertainment corporation Time Warner has some 32,000 employees, and the Royal Bank of Canada over twice that number. Caesar’s Entertainment Corporation, which runs casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada employs more than 70,000 persons; Bollywood—the Indian film industry—has more than 100,000 employees, as does Tyson Foods; the French hypermarket chain Carrefour has 476,000 employees; the US Department of Agriculture about 98,000 employees; and McDonalds has more than 1.7 million employees—400,000 less than Walmart. The world’s largest employer is the US Department of Defense, with around 3.2 million employees.

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  3. What is the price of UN peacekeeping?

    The separate peacekeeping budget for 2011/12 is $7.1 billion. Annual UN peacekeeping costs amount to less than 0.5 per cent of total world military expenditures, estimated at $1.6 trillion in 2010—a figure itself dwarfed by the actual costs of wars and armed conflicts. During 2011, for example, the United States spent some $14 billion per month to support its military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. That amount is twice what the United Nations spends to run all 15 of its current peacekeeping missions for an entire year.—Each UN peacekeeper costs a fraction of what it would cost to field a United States soldier to do the same job: a little more than a quarter of the cost. For the United States, this means that there are 15 places in the world (including Darfur, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti—which together consume half of the peacekeeping budget—or Kosovo and Lebanon) where US troops will probably not have to intervene because UN troops are already doing so at a fraction of the cost of US operations elsewhere.



    What do countries get in return for their investment in the United Nations?

    The United Nations provides benefits that range from peace and security, development, health and the rule of law to the ‘soft infrastructure’ allowing business to prosper. But the United Nations is also itself a business partner for Member States. The 10 countries that supplied United Nations organizations with the most goods and services in 2010 totalled sales of $6.6 billion (out of a global total of $14.5 billion). The United States sold goods and services to United Nations organizations for $1.5 billion, followed by Switzerland ($841 million), Afghanistan ($669 million), the Sudan ($601 million), India ($567 million), the Russian Federation ($486 million) and the United Kingdom ($490 million). For countries that host a UN office, this also means the presence of UN staff members and their families boosting the local economy.—Some 26% of the business done by the United Nations Secretariat went to the United States, and about 14% to the Russian Federation. More than 80% of such procurement involves meeting the requirements of peacekeeping operations.

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  4. Are UN staff members overpaid?

    To attract qualified personnel, Member States have decided that the net salaries of UN professional staff—some 25,500 employees, or 34 per cent of the total staff—should be comparable to the net salaries of equivalently graded jobs in the highest-paid national civil service—at present considered the federal civil service of the United States, with its 2.3 million civilian employees. Characteristic of both are high education requirements, and a high proportion of ‘white-collar’ jobs. Compensation at both, however, still falls short of salaries and benefits for comparable work in the private sector for those with a professional or advanced degree, controlling for differences in years of experience, occupation, employer size and geography.—In order to secure highly qualified and dedicated professionals from around the world, the UN must be a competitive employer offering competitive conditions and benefits. A margin in favour of UN salaries with respect to its comparator, the US federal civil service, takes account of the predominately expatriate character of UN service, since the international civil service recruits staff from all its Member States for postings around the world.—The average annual compensation figure for US federal workers is about $113,000. The average annual cost related to UN personnel (not compensation as such) is some $119,000.—While most Member States have granted UN staff exemption from national income taxation, and the UN reimburses those UN staff who are subject to national income tax, all UN staff must pay a 'staff assessment' on their salary—a form of internal income tax, with rates being derived from national income tax rates applicable at the seven headquarters cities of the organizations in the UN system (Geneva, London, Montreal, New York, Paris, Rome, and Vienna). For example, staff assessment rates for professional and higher categories (with dependants) for the first and subsequent salary increments of $50,000 are 19%, 28%, 32% and 35%, respectively.— As far as the salary of leadership is concerned, the Secretary-General's salary, which has not changed since 1997, is $227,253. That of the President of the United States is $400,000; that of the president of New York University is $1,2 million; that of the CEO of Time Warner $15.3 million; that of the CEO of Walt Disney $53.3 million.

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  5. Has the United Nations ever really done anything for peace?

    By sending 65 peacekeeping and observer missions to the world’s trouble spots over the past 64 years, the United Nations has helped restore calm, allowing many countries to begin to recover from the ravages of conflict. Since its inception, the UN has helped negotiate more than 170 peace agreements. Recent conflicts brought to an end through UN mediation or the action of third parties acting with UN support include Sierra Leone (2002), Liberia (2003), Burundi (2005), the north-south conflict in the Sudan (2005), and Nepal (2007). The UN helped defuse hostilities involving the superpowers during the Berlin crisis (1948/49), the Suez crisis (1956), the Cuban missile crisis (1962) and the Middle East crisis (1973). UN peacemaking, peacekeeping and conflict prevention are major factors behind a 40 per cent decline in conflicts worldwide since the 1990s. To date, 178 states have entered into UN safeguards agreements verifying commitments not to use nuclear programmes for weaponry purposes.



    Has the United Nations ever really done anything for democracy and human rights?

    The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 sets a common standard to ensure that all human beings are treated equally. The United Nations has advanced and supported democracy and democractic goverance through electoral assistance provided to over 50 countries since 2010 alone. The UN has assisted in milestone elections in many countries, including Afghanistan, Burundi, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Sierra Leone, the Sudan, and Timor-Leste.The United Nations has formulated more than 80 treaties and declarations protecting and promoting human rights, for example, banning the participation of children under 18 in armed conflict and prohibiting the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography. Special Rapporteurs oversee implementation of human rights in specific countries or monitor global problems, such as torture, forced disappearances and illegal executions, ‘naming and shaming’ the perpetrators. For more than three decades, the United Nations carried out a sustained campaign against apartheid in South Africa, then supervised the country’s first free and multiracial election in 1994.—By prosecuting and convicting war criminals, UN International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda have helped fight impunity and expand international law dealing with genocide and other heinous crimes, as well as contributed to restoring peace and justice in the affected countries and regions. UN-backed special courts and tribunals in In Cambodia, Lebanon and Sierra Leone have also helped countries deal with violations of international humanitarian law and extraordinary crimes.

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  6. Has the United Nations ever eradicated a disease?

    A 13-year effort by the United Nations resulted in smallpox being declared eradicated in 1980. The eradication saved an estimated $1 billion a year in vaccination and monitoring. Another, 16-year campaign by the United Nations resulted in the global eradication of rinderpest in 2011. Together with Rotary International and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations is leading efforts to eliminate poliomyelitis, and working with these partners, the Carter Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to eradicate dracunculiasis (guinea worm disease). Between 2004 and 2010, the UN supplied over 400 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets in malaria-endemic countries to help prevent the disease.



    Has the United Nations ever really done anything to protect the environment?

    Protecting the environment relies on international collaboration. In the 1980s, the UN was instrumental in bringing about treaties that helped cut oil pollution from ships by 60 per cent. The UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora has accorded protection to more than 30,000 species of animals and plants. The UN Montreal Protocol for phasing out production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances has succeeded in stopping ozone losses damaging to human immune systems, wildlife and agriculture. The UN Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants requires eliminating or reducing 12 hazardous pesticides and industrial chemicals that can kill people, damage the nervous and immune systems, cause cancer and interfere with child development. The 194 countries that are members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, in effect since 1994, are negotiating agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.



    Has the United Nations ever really done anything against terrorism?

    The United Nations adopted in 2006 the first-ever global strategy for Governments to coordinate their counter-terrorism efforts. UN agencies and programmes help countries put in practice this strategy by providing legal assistance. Negotiated under UN auspices, 14 legal agreements provide a global framework for fighting terrorism—including treaties against hostage-taking, aircraft hijacking, terrorist bombings, terrorism financing and nuclear terrorism.The United Nations also coordinates efforts to counter use of the Internet by terrorists for fundraising, training, recruitment, secret communication, data mining, propaganda and radicalization, as well as cyber attacks.

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  7. Has the United Nations ever really done anything against criminality and illicit drug trafficking?

    The UN works with governments and organizations to counter transnational organized crime by providing legal and technical assistance to fight corruption, money-laundering, drug trafficking and smuggling of migrants, as well as by strengthening criminal justice systems. It helps countries prevent terrorism, is a leader in the global fight against trafficking in persons and, together with the World Bank, helps countries recover assets stolen by corrupt leaders. It helped broker and implement the UN Convention against Corruption and the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.—The UN works to reduce the supply of and demand for illicit drugs under the three main UN conventions on drug control. It also collaborates with governments to improve public health, as well as public security, in order to prevent, treat and control drug abuse. Efforts to contain the global drug problem have reversed a 25-year rise in drug abuse. The UN is especially engaged in drug control in Afghanistan, the Andean countries, Central Asia, Myanmar and West Africa, which remain particularly vulnerable to the instability caused by drug cultivation and trafficking.




    Has the United Nations ever really done anything against the illicit arms trade?

    Illegally acquired small arms are the weapon of choice of terrorists, pirates, gang members and insurgents. The illicit circulation of small arms, light weapons and their ammunition destabilizes communities and endangers security and development. More human rights abuses are committed with small arms than with any other weapon. Ten arms embargoes imposed by the Security Council are currently in place. To ensure that small arms from Government or private ownership do not enter illicit circuits, countries have agreed at the UN on several commitments on small arms control, such as the Firearms Protocol, the Programme of Action including an Instrument on marking and tracing small arms, and the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. Some 170 countries voluntarily report to the UN Register of Conventional Arms.



    How is the United Nations serving the public with information about its work?

    The number of followers of the UN Twitter account has now surpassed 700,000. On Facebook, the posts of the United Nations Information Centre have already had more than 3 million views, while those on the Millennium Goals account have registered more than 1 million views. UN Weibo, a channel on Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging platform in Chinese, had close to 700,000 fans registered already in mid-2011. The total number of views on Youku and Tudou, the top-two Chinese video-sharing websites, of clips covering a broad range of United Nations issues reached 2.8 million in 2011. The United Nations Youtube channel has around 20,000 subscribers and over 6000,000 channel views. The United Nations Photo Flickr photostream reached a milestone already in early 2011 when it registered 1 million views.

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  8. Has the United Nations ever really done anything against criminality and illicit drug trafficking?

    The UN works with governments and organizations to counter transnational organized crime by providing legal and technical assistance to fight corruption, money-laundering, drug trafficking and smuggling of migrants, as well as by strengthening criminal justice systems. It helps countries prevent terrorism, is a leader in the global fight against trafficking in persons and, together with the World Bank, helps countries recover assets stolen by corrupt leaders. It helped broker and implement the UN Convention against Corruption and the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.—The UN works to reduce the supply of and demand for illicit drugs under the three main UN conventions on drug control. It also collaborates with governments to improve public health, as well as public security, in order to prevent, treat and control drug abuse. Efforts to contain the global drug problem have reversed a 25-year rise in drug abuse. The UN is especially engaged in drug control in Afghanistan, the Andean countries, Central Asia, Myanmar and West Africa, which remain particularly vulnerable to the instability caused by drug cultivation and trafficking.




    Has the United Nations ever really done anything against the illicit arms trade?

    Illegally acquired small arms are the weapon of choice of terrorists, pirates, gang members and insurgents. The illicit circulation of small arms, light weapons and their ammunition destabilizes communities and endangers security and development. More human rights abuses are committed with small arms than with any other weapon. Ten arms embargoes imposed by the Security Council are currently in place. To ensure that small arms from Government or private ownership do not enter illicit circuits, countries have agreed at the UN on several commitments on small arms control, such as the Firearms Protocol, the Programme of Action including an Instrument on marking and tracing small arms, and the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. Some 170 countries voluntarily report to the UN Register of Conventional Arms.



    How is the United Nations serving the public with information about its work?

    The number of followers of the UN Twitter account has now surpassed 700,000. On Facebook, the posts of the United Nations Information Centre have already had more than 3 million views, while those on the Millennium Goals account have registered more than 1 million views. UN Weibo, a channel on Sina Weibo, the popular microblogging platform in Chinese, had close to 700,000 fans registered already in mid-2011. The total number of views on Youku and Tudou, the top-two Chinese video-sharing websites, of clips covering a broad range of United Nations issues reached 2.8 million in 2011. The United Nations Youtube channel has around 20,000 subscribers and over 6000,000 channel views. The United Nations Photo Flickr photostream reached a milestone already in early 2011 when it registered 1 million views.

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