No show — world leaders will be absent from this year's UN General Assembly meeting in New York
Credit: Anadolu Agency
AS the diamond jubilee of the global club of nations, one might expect there to be partying in the corridors of power.But as the 75th annual session of the United Nations General Assembly gets underway today (TUES) in New York, the atmosphere is somewhat downbeat.
For a start, Covid-19 has forced the annual diplomatic jamboree to be held for the first time in virtual fashion. Where normally the streets of New York are jammed with presidential motorcades, this year the heads of state will deliver pre-recorded speeches by video conference. It has been dubbed "The mother of all Zoom meetings — although given the global squabbling that the virus has sparked, many world leaders may be happy to be self-isolating anyway.
The outbreak has already escalated tensions between the US and China, with President Donald Trump accusing Beijing of deliberately underplaying the threat from the virus. Chinese officials, in turn, have voiced conspiracy theories that it was spread by the US military, and resisted calls for an independent probe into the outbreak’s origins.
Reluctant guest — Donald Trump is no big fan of the UN
Credit: Reuters
It is not just Beijing, though, that may face flak at UNGA. Many world leaders — Mr Trump included — have been accused of sluggish responses to the virus, or in some cases of denying it exists at all. Aid agencies, meanwhile, fear that wealthy nations plan to monopolise vaccine stocks, reinforcing the global gap rich and the poor. At a time of unprecedented common threat, the one thing most UNGA participants might agree on is that the global response could be better.
It is, however, the institutions of the UN itself that are likely to face most scrutiny. Both America and Britain are backing calls for urgent reform of the UN’s World Health Organisation, claiming that it let China hide the outbreak’s dangers in its early stages.
Criticism has focused on the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who appeared at first to take Chinese government reassurances at face value. In January, he even praised China’s leaders for "setting a new standard for outbreak response". It was not until-mid March that the WHO finally declared Covid a pandemic, by which time the virus had already spread to nearly every continent. That led to Mr Trump cutting off US funding for the WHO in May, claiming it had become a "public relations agency" for China.
Under fire… Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Critics, though, say he is simply dragging the global health body into his trade dispute with China, undermining the WHO just when the world most needs it.
"Trump’s criticisms have gained a lot of attention, and so close to the US elections, you can guarantee he will stir up sentiment against multi-lateral institutions," said Robert Yates, director of the global health programme at London’s Chatham House think-tank. "But the WHO has been doing a lot of good work, for example in setting up pooled financing for coronavirus vaccines and tests, which will hopefully ensure equitable distribution around the world."
Britain has declined to follow the US in defunding the WHO, viewing the move as counterproductive. But Downing Street does back a probe into whether the WHO was too timid in its dealings with China over Covid. WHO officials are said to have feared that Beijing would cut off cooperation altogether if they were too confrontational.
Brett Schaefer, a research fellow in international regulatory affairs at the Heritage Foundation, a US conservative think-tank, said that while UN functionaries were seldom shy of criticising Western nations, they had held back against Beijing.
"If the UK had treated the WHO like China did, the WHO would have said so," he said. "There is essentially a double standard here, where countries that are transparent and responsible are held to a higher standard than those who aren’t .We have seen hundreds of thousands of people die, and all because of a lack of willingness to hold Beijing up to proper standards."
Britain is now backing a beefed-up pandemic monitoring system, with countries facing sanctions if they frustrate the work of WHO officials. Another innovation would be a graded spectrum of pandemic alerts, rather than the current all-or-nothing approach.
Mr Schaefer believes that the WHO should also reduce its focus on issues such as tobacco use and mental health, which he argues can be dealt with by nation states.
"Only a fraction of the WHO’s budget is actually spent on transnational health threats such as communicable diseases, which is what it should concentrate on," he said.
Whether the UNGA discussions will lead to a leaner, fitter WHO is another matter. Like many large trans-national bureaucracies, the UN often resists change, not least because of the tensions between its member nation states.
While some see it as a useful bulwark against US dominance, others — like Mr Trump — feel it is over-mighty and prone to lecturing the US, be it on climate change, wealth distribution, or health care. The latter used to be considered one of UNGA’s less contentious areas of debate: Covid, however, has proved that pandemics are as political as anything else.
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