"In Larger Freedom": Decision Time at the UN

Kofi Annan

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

Summary:  Dealing with today's threats requires broad, deep, and sustained global cooperation. Thus the states of the world must create a collective security system to prevent terrorism, strengthen nonproliferation, and bring peace to war-torn areas, while also promoting human rights, democracy, and development. And the UN must go through its most radical overhaul yet.

Kofi Annan is Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Future generations will not forgive us if we continue down this path. We cannot just muddle along and make do with incremental responses in an era when organized crime syndicates seek to smuggle both sex slaves and nuclear materials across borders; when whole societies are being laid waste by AIDS; when rapid advances in biotechnology make it all too feasible to create "designer bugs" immune to current vaccines; and when terrorists, whose ambitions are very plain, find ready recruits among young men in societies with little hope, even less justice, and narrowly sectarian schools. It is urgent that our world unite to master today's threats and not allow them to divide us and thus master us.

In recent months, I have received two wide-ranging reviews of our global challenges: one from the 16-member High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, which I had asked to make proposals to strengthen our collective security system; the other from 250 experts who undertook the UN Millennium Project and devised a plan to cut global poverty in half within the next ten years. Both reports are remarkable as much for their hardheaded realism as for their bold vision. Having carefully studied them, and extensively consulted UN member states, I have just placed before the world's governments my own blueprint for a new era of global cooperation and collective action.

My report, entitled "In Larger Freedom," calls on states to use the summit of world leaders that will be held at UN headquarters in September to strengthen our collective security, lay down a truly global strategy for development, advance the cause of human rights and democracy in all nations, and put in place new mechanisms to ensure that these commitments are translated into action. Accountability -- of states to their citizens, of states to one another, of international institutions to their members, and of this present generation to future ones -- is essential for our success. With that in mind, the UN must undergo the most sweeping overhaul of its 60-year history. World leaders must recapture the spirit of San Francisco and forge a new world compact to advance the cause of larger freedom.

FREEDOM FROM FEAR

The starting point for a new consensus should be a broad view of today's threats. These dangers include not just international wars but also civil violence, organized crime, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction. They also include poverty, infectious disease, and environmental degradation, since these ills can also have catastrophic consequences and wreak tremendous damage. All of these can undermine states as the basic units of the international system.

All states -- strong and weak, rich and poor -- share an interest in having a collective security system that commits them to act cooperatively against a broad array of threats. The basis of such a system must be a new commitment to preventing latent threats from becoming imminent and imminent threats from becoming actual, as well as an agreement on when and how force should be used if preventive strategies fail.

Action is required on many fronts, but three of them stand out as particularly urgent. First, we must ensure that catastrophic terrorism never becomes a reality. In that cause, we must make use of the unique normative strength, global reach, and convening power of the UN. To start, a comprehensive convention against terrorism should be developed. The UN has been central in helping states negotiate and adopt 12 international antiterrorism conventions, but a comprehensive convention outlawing terrorism in all its forms has so far eluded us because of debates on "state terrorism" and the right to resist occupation. It is time to put these debates aside. The use of force by states is already thoroughly regulated under international law. And the right to resist occupation must be understood in its true meaning: it cannot include the right deliberately to kill or maim civilians. World leaders should unite behind a definition of terrorism that makes clear beyond any question that the targeting of civilians or noncombatants is never acceptable. And they must work to strengthen the capacity of states to meet the binding antiterrorism obligations imposed on them by the Security Council.

Equally urgent is the need to breathe new life into our multilateral frameworks for the management of biological, chemical, and especially nuclear weapons; we must prevent the proliferation of these weapons and keep them out of the most dangerous hands. For 35 years, the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), signed by all but three nations in the world, has greatly reduced the danger of nuclear weapons' being used by placing strict but voluntarily accepted limits on their possession. But recently, for the first time, a party (North Korea) has withdrawn from the treaty, and strains on its verification and enforcement measures have led to a crisis of confidence.

To prevent a cascade of proliferation, we must find ways to mitigate the tensions caused by the fact that technology required for civilian uses of nuclear power can also be used to develop nuclear weapons. The verification role of the International Atomic Energy Agency should be strengthened through universal acceptance of the Model Additional Protocol (which toughens the NPT's reporting requirements and inspection regime), and incentives should be developed to help states forgo the development of sensitive fuel-cycle activities while guaranteeing them the fuel they need for peaceful purposes. We should also welcome other initiatives, such as Security Council Resolution 1540, which aims to prevent nonstate actors from gaining access to hazardous weapons, technology, and materials, and the voluntary Proliferation Security Initiative, through which an increasing number of states are cooperating to prevent illicit trafficking in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and materials.