The UN Charter needs rewriting

On Sunday, the world’s governments made a series of commitments to transform global governance at the United Nations Summit of the Future in New York. The ambitiously named summit was described as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to “forge a new global consensus on what our future should look like”.

Indeed, we are at a critical time when change is urgently needed.

The world faces “a moment of historic danger”, with increasingly imminent risks – from nuclear war to a planetary emergency, from persistent poverty and widening inequality to the unhindered advancement of artificial intelligence – threatening humanity’s very existence.

These are global challenges that cannot be solved purely at the national level: The people of the world need – and deserve – better coordinated global action.

Yet our global governance institutions have proven incapable of addressing current crises, from the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan to the increasing impacts of climate change.

And in an increasingly multipolar world, emerging powers that find the current system – particularly the composition of the UN Security Council – unfair and unrepresentative are losing faith in multilateralism and risk withdrawing from it altogether. That doesn’t serve anyone, including the so-called great powers.

And yet UN member states failed – due, some of them argue, to a few spoilers – to take full advantage of the opportunity that the Summit of the Future presented.

In the months leading up to the summit, intergovernmental negotiations were contentious and went down to the wire with diverging opinions on the proposed language to reform the international financial architecture, support human rights and gender, further climate action and disarmament, and reform the UN Security Council.

After more than two years of preparations, several revisions and countless hours of diplomatic energy, the summit produced an agreement known as the “Pact for the Future”. The document takes incremental steps forward in the right direction but mostly at the level of principles and reaffirmations of commitments already made, not concrete actions.

The modest advances in the agreement – including a recognition of the need to redress the historical injustice and underrepresentation of Africa in the UN Security Council, a commitment to protect the needs and interests of future generations, the first international agreement on governance of artificial intelligence, and support for increasing the voice of developing countries in the decision-making governance of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank – fall below what many civil society organisations – and some governments – advocated for.

Given how high the stakes are, what is outlined in the Pact for the Future is simply not enough.

We, therefore, propose a more fundamental reform to our international order – one that goes back to the basics, to the founding constitutional document of today’s international relations: the Charter of the United Nations.

Amid the polarised negotiations in the lead-up to the Summit of the Future, the broad principles laid out in the UN Charter were often the one thing countries could agree on. To be sure, some of its key principles need only to be reinforced – and the charter’s renewal could help modernise their application. Others need to be revised altogether.

The charter was adopted in 1945 by only 51 countries because most of Africa and parts of Asia were still colonised. It cemented power in the hands of the winners of World War II and, until today, uses the language of “enemy states” in reference to Germany, Japan and other “Axis” powers. The words “climate change” – or even “environment” – let alone “artificial intelligence” do not appear in the text.

The UN Charter was always meant to be a living document. At the international conference in San Francisco where it was adopted, then-United States President Harry Truman said: “This charter … will be expanded and improved as time goes on. No one claims that it is now a final or a perfect instrument. It has not been poured into any fixed mould. Changing world conditions will require readjustments.”

The best way to address global challenges is to set up a new global social contract – one that recognises that the international power balance has changed since 1945, one that prioritises shared protection of our global commons over state sovereignty, and one that puts the world’s people and future generations before short-sighted national interests.

A new charter could not only redistribute power in a more equitable way and treat threats like climate change and artificial intelligence seriously, it could also make the UN more effective by increasing enforcement and accountability.

In an interconnected age of pandemics, climate change and cyberthreats, when people are increasingly affected by decisions taken outside their country’s borders, a new charter could introduce a parliamentary assembly made up of representatives elected by the people of the world, giving them a say in the way world affairs are run and ushering in a whole new era of inclusion and representation.

A detailed proposal on what a new charter could look like is presented in this report by the Global Governance Forum. To be clear, many useful improvements to global governance do not require charter reform and should, we believe, simultaneously be pursued while we work towards more comprehensive, long-term change.

Given how difficult the Summit of the Future-related negotiations were around much more modest reforms, some ask: Is any of this even realistic?

Procedurally, our proposal to reform the UN Charter draws on the charter’s own provisions: Article 109 calls for a general conference to be held to review the charter if supported by a two-thirds vote of the UN General Assembly and any nine members of the UN Security Council.

This particular provision was included in the charter as a concession to the many countries opposed to the idea of the permanent members of the Security Council having veto power. The intention was to review and revise this arrangement over time. Thus, reforming the UN Charter was part of the original plan.

Last year, a high-level advisory board appointed by the UN secretary-general to provide recommendations on how to make multilateralism more effective, co-chaired by former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, included in its recommendations the activation of Article 109 for the purposes of reforming the UN Security Council.

There are very valid concerns about reopening the charter.

Some fear that in today’s polarised climate, in which many previously agreed concepts like human rights are now contested, we could end up with something worse.

But no reforms to the charter can be adopted unless they secure support from a majority of governments as well as the permanent five members of the Security Council. Until such agreement exists, the current charter stands, so there is a fail-safe mechanism against regression.

Besides, even if the process does carry risks, the world’s current trajectory carries higher risks.

It is hard to argue that the political mood right now is conducive to cooperation. But it is exactly in times of crises that breakthroughs tend to occur. The League of Nations and the UN were both born out of world wars. Must we wait for World War III before coming up with a better system?

Our current global governance isn’t tenable. We know it will need to change. So we are appealing to UN members to start laying the groundwork for that change now because the process to reform the UN Charter will take years.

The Summit of the Future failed to deliver the radical change the world needs to truly live up to the UN objectives to maintain peace and security and achieve international cooperation in solving collective problems.

A tipping point for that radical change will come eventually. And when it does, we should be ready.

Tim Murithi, the head of the peacebuilding programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation; Augusto Lopez-Claros, the executive director of the Global Governance Forum; and Fergus Watt, the coordinator of the Coalition for the UN We Need, are also co-authors of this article.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.