End of UN Internal Corruption Unit Shows Folly of Human Security Taxes
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
According to a recent Associated Press review, the United Nations has cut back sharply on investigations into corruption and fraud within its ranks, shelving cases involving the possible theft or misuse of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, at the same time, the UN, Japan, and the United States of America are promoting a broad "human security" agenda, which, if the World Health Organization adopts the global taxation proposals of one of its expert working groups, would result in billions of dollars flowing into the UN public health agency's coffers.
The concept of "human security" was first articulated in the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report. In contrast to the traditional security paradigm, which focuses on the interests of nations and the security of territory, human security places individuals and their needs at the center of policy-making. It provides a philosophical basis for identifying threats to people's security, including natural disasters, poverty, disease, inequality, and violence, and for searching for responses to these threats. The UN and its Member States rely on the human security concept as justification for financing humanitarian interventions to save people from "harm" at the hands of their own governments and/or human rights interventions to save people from "want" of basic material needs.
Different countries have different approaches to human security. As the lynchpin of a non-militaristic foreign policy that fits nicely into its political landscape, Japan has promoted the expansive notion of human security adopted by the UN General Assembly in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document:
143. We stress the right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair. We recognize that all individuals, in particular vulnerable people, are entitled to freedom from fear and freedom from want, with an equal opportunity to enjoy all their rights and fully develop their human potential. To this end, we commit ourselves to discussing and defining the notion of human security in the General Assembly.
In March 1999, Japan and the UN Secretariat launched the United Nations Trust Fund for Human Security, which, since its inception, has funded $340 million for human security interventions in over 70 countries. The Commission on Human Security shares Japan's all-encompassing approach to human security, defining human security as the protection of "the vital core of all human lives in ways that enhance human freedoms and fulfillment." In its view, human security is far more than the absence of violent conflict and "requires the creation of political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that, when combined, give people the building blocks for survival, livelihood, and dignity."
For their parts, Canada and the European Union have adopted a human security approach that focuses more on protecting people from the threat of physical harm than it does on protecting people from the lack of long-term material well being. According to the EU human security strategy, the five key threats to human security are terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, regional conflicts, failing states, and organized crimes. Interestingly, in 2009, according to Internet reports, political appointees in Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada ("DFAIT"), which was involved very early in promoting a "responsibility to protect" approach to human security, re-named Canada's Human Security Program (dropping the phrase "human security") and instructed DFAIT foreign services civil servants to refrain from using the "human security" phrase, both internally and externally.
With the election of Barack Obama as President, it appears that the United States will move closer to the broader, more ambitious, as well as more ambiguous and arbitrary human security agenda followed by the UN and Japan. Such a conclusion is evidenced by the foreign policy goals set forth in "Strengthening our Common Security by Investing in our Common Humanity: Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Strategy to Promote Global Development and Democracy ." The implementation of this more expansive human security agenda was confirmed in the following remarks made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at Georgetown University on December 14, 2009:
Our human rights agenda for the 21st century is to make human rights a human reality, and the first step is to see human rights in a broad context. Of course, people must be free from the oppression of tyranny, from torture, from discrimination, from the fear of leaders who will imprison or "disappear" them. But they also must be free from the oppression of want - want of food, want of health, want of education, and want of equality in law and in fact.
Of course, the realization of this more expansive human security agenda is contingent on at least two significant factors: the availability of financial resources to fund the agenda and the ability of the UN to implement the agenda effectively and efficiently.
As part of its human security agenda, the World Health Organization ("WHO") has embarked on an ambitious strategy to increase funding for public health research and development so as to eliminate health "inequities" that exist between developed and developing countries. On December 23, 2009, the WHO Director-General transmitted to the WHO Executive Board the executive summary of the Report of the Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing (the "Executive Summary"). The Executive Summary highlights numerous proposals of the 25-member panel of medical experts, academics, and health care bureaucrats regarding "new and innovative sources of funding" that could raise billions of dollars to facilitate the transfer of drug-making research, development, and manufacturing capabilities to the developing world.
The "suite of proposals" for financing the transformation of the global medical industry includes the following tax schemes:
· A ten percent tax on the international arms trade, which might net about $5 billion per annum;
· A "digital tax or ‘hit' tax" that "could yield tens of billions of U.S. dollars from a broad base of users;"
· A financial transaction tax, a cited example of which is a levy in Brazil that charged 0.38 percent on bills paid online and on unspecified "major withdrawals," that was raising an estimated $20 billion per year until cancelled for unspecified reasons.
The model for the WHO's implementation of taxes to fund the global human security health agenda is UNITAID , a UN program created to battle against HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. UNITAID is financed in part by a "solidarity contribution" levy of anywhere from $1.20 to $58 on airline tickets among a group of nations led by France, Brazil, Chile, Norway, and Britain. According to the Executive Summary, it has raised around $1 billion since its inception, with 13 countries having already passed the airline tax legislation and several others in the process of doing so. UNITAID's board chairman, Philippe Douste-Blazy, a former French Cabinet Minister and currently special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on "innovative financing for development," is also a member of the WHO expert working group.
As bad an idea it is to finance and implement broad, ambiguous, expensive, and un-democratic human security interventions, it is even worse to provide the UN with the mandate and tax revenues to do so. In 2006, after more than 2,200 companies from some 40 countries colluded with Saddam Hussein's regime to bilk $1.8 billion from a UN-administered oil-for-food program for Iraqi humanitarian relief, the UN established a special anti-corruption unit, the Procurement Task Force. However, at the beginning of 2009, the UN terminated the agency and diverted its work to the Office of Internal Oversight Services' permanent investigation division. Since then, according to the Associated Press examination of UN documents, audits and e-mails, along with dozens of interviews with current and former UN officials and diplomats, the number of internal corruption review cases opened, pursued or completed has dropped dramatically and the division has terminated most former task force investigators. According to the AP report:
Over the past year, not a single significant fraud or corruption case has been completed, compared with an average of 150 cases a year investigated by the task force. The permanent investigation division decided not to even pursue about 95 cases left over when the task forced ceased operation, while another 80 unfinished cases have languished. It also stopped probes into contractors and cut qualified staff and other resources-and halted five major corruption investigations documented by the task force in the final days of 2008.
The promotion of an expansive human security agenda, the financing of that agenda through global "human security" taxes, and the vesting of the UN with responsibility for implementing that agenda and spending those tax revenues in the face of serious questions regarding its commitment to combating internal corruption creates a perfect storm that does not bode well for the U.S. ship of state.
Jim Kelly is the President of Solidarity Center for Law and Justice, P.C., a public interest civil and human rights law firm based in Atlanta, Georgia. The opinions expressed herein are his own.
A JOINT PROGRAM OF
