UN lacks transparency, says law scholar

UN:The reform of the United Nations is faced with "intractable difficulties", international law scholar Prof Ruth Wedgwood said last night when she delivered the annual Seán Lester lecture to the Irish Society of International Law in Dublin.

Prof Wedgwood of John Hopkins University and Yale Law School is the US member of the UN Human Rights Committee.

She said the UN's problems were "both political and managerial". The organisation was characterised by a lack of flexibility and transparency. While it was based on universalism, the UN was in fact very parochial as it was made up of a series of regional groups.

People who were outside these groups could not attend their meetings and the mechanisms of getting agreement meant that those with the most intense preferences tended to govern.

Prof Wedgwood said economic sanctions had proved to be ineffective as they hit the civilian population hardest.

Making exceptions for humanitarian reasons, for example in Iraq, merely increased the lever- age of autocrats.

She also said the UN had failed in its duty to intervene because of the lack of investment in military strength. Instead, it was reduced to trying to disown other people's use of force.

Prof Wedgwood called for "a whole lot more transparency" in the UN. She urged the media to question the inner workings of the organisation.

"I would favour a type of freedom of information act for the UN," she said. The knowledge that the public might be able to receive previously declassified information would be an incentive for good governance, Prof Wedgwood said.

The UN needed to learn how to answer to modern democratic legislatures. Otherwise, if it did not take steps to reform it would become irrelevant.

Prof Wedgwood was the second person to deliver the Seán Lester lecture.

The Irish Society of International Law initiated the lecture to pay tribute to the Irish man who served as the last secretary general of the League of Nations.