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This section serves as an introductory brief to the topics that will serve as the agenda and basis for debate at the conference. Delegates should conduct further research to get deeper knowledge for substantive debate, as well as to ascertain the details of their member states position on each issue.

Some parts of this topic guide directly quote referential sources such as abstracts, articles, and open source literature that are not cited. It does not claim originality over any of the work, and is produced with the intent to comply with intellectual property protocol. All references are open source.

Click here to see the topics and the guide about the Security Council.

The following topics will comprise the agenda of the General Assembly:
1. UN Reform
2. Definition of, prevention of, and intervention in cases of Genocide

"Every day we are reminded of the need for a strengthened United Nations, as we face a growing array of new challenges, including humanitarian crises, human rights violations, armed conflicts and important health and environmental concerns. Seldom has the United Nations been called upon to do so much for so many. I am determined to breathe new life and inject renewed confidence into a strengthened United Nations firmly anchored in the twenty-first century, and which is effective, efficient, coherent and accountable."
- Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

Among Member States, there is a general consensus that reform is need to better allow the United Nations to meet the challenges of the 21st Century. However, the future of the UN and what reforms will be undertaken remain under debate. One of the most common arguments is that the UN needs to become more democratic and representative of today’s world. Accordingly, one of the proposed reforms we will be debating is The Binding Triad. In the General Assembly the Binding Triad would reflect three factors:

1) the sovereign equality of all member states
2) the importance of every human being
3 the member state’s contribution to the UN budget

Decisions utilizing the Binding Triad would still be made with a single vote but with three simultaneous majorities within that vote. A computer program would report whether the resolution had the support of:

1) two thirds of the states present and voting
2) states representing the agreed upon majority of the world’s population
3) states representing the agreed upon majority of the UN budget

The Binding Triad was devised by the Late Richard Hudson, founder of the Center for War/Peace Studies.

For more information visit:
www.cwps.org
http://www.un.org/reform/

In the current form of the United Nations and other international organizations, the prevention of genocide is an issue that continues to go unresolved. Within the United Nations system, there are provisions for the prevention of genocide, and what should constitute a response or intervention. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lays out provisions, though the situation in Rwanda and Darfur question its application and enforcement.

In 1948, the world community established the crime of genocide with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide convention). Under the convention, genocide consists of killings and other acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” The Genocide convention specifically allows prosecution of the designated crimes in both domestic and international courts. Naturally, genocide itself is punishable as a crime, but the Genocide convention also separately lists the crimes of conspiracy to commit genocide, incitement to commit genocide, attempted genocide, and complicity in genocide.

The definition of genocide in a practical sense continues to go unresolved. In Darfur for example, international calls for the ending of a genocide came to deaf ears when the global leaders, the United States and China, abstained from intervention. In 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 (2004) issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide." Though a few months later when the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution. In the final report from the ICC to the Security Council, the Prosecutor has found "reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified (in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593) have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes," but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide. To this date, no military intervention has responded to the crisis in Darfur, though several arrest warrants through the ICC have been issued, including one for President Omar al Bashir, which include three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder.

There are a number of proposals that the United Nations has considered that would strengthen its capabilities to respond to a genocide.

R2P
The concept of the Responsibility to Protect (“R2P”) is a comparatively new idea in contemporary international law. One of the cornerstones of R2P is that sovereignty entails not only rights, but also responsibilities, and that States have a primary responsibility is to protect its people. The concept of the R2P aims to provide a proper legal basis to intervene in a particular State if it is unable or unwilling to protect its population from genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and/or crimes against humanity.

The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, an initiative of the former SG Kofi Annan, also endorsed the re-characterization of sovereignty as responsibility.63 Its report in 2004, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, states that the principle of R2P can be applied to four categories of violations of international law – war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In his next report, In larger freedom, Kofi Annan endorsed the importance of a collective Responsibility to Protect: “[I] believe that we must embrace the responsibility to protect and, when necessary, we must act on it.”

According to Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group and former Foreign Minister of Australia, and Mohamed Sahnoun, Special Adviser on Africa to the UN Secretary-General, the concept of the R2P embraces the responsibility to react, the responsibility to prevent, and the responsibility to rebuild. As suggested by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown, the responsibility to protect is not only about the intervention, but also the fact that more attention should be paid to reconstruction and development in post-conflict situations. While the responsibility to react concerns the proper form of response (such as sanctions, embargoes, and intervention), the responsibility to prevent is the most important of these three dimensions, as successful early actions can often prevent conflict escalation. According to the President of the General Assembly of the UN 57th session, H.E. Jan Kavan, “setting standards for accountability of Member States and contributing to the establishment of prevention practices at the local, national, regional and global levels are concepts worth promoting”.

UN Permanent Emergency Peace Keeping Force
In order to address ever-increasing needs for the international community to respond rapidly and effectively to emerging crises, the United Nations Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) was proposed as a permanent emergency response service designed to complement, not replace existing peace operations. UNEPS would have first in - first out capabilities, designed to supplement the UN's capacity to provide stability, peace, and relief in deadly emergencies.

In Darfur, the Sudanese government has effectively prevented the UN from deploying peacekeeping forces, which has contributed to the unraveling of the May 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement. If the international community had UNEPS in its arsenal during negotiation of the peace accord, the deployment of a UNEPS mission to Darfur could have been included in the Darfur Peace Agreement. By the time national peacekeepers were ready to replace UNEPS, the situation on the ground would have stabilized or, at minimum, become more manageable. UNEPS would help prevent early stage crises escalating into national or regional disasters. It is a timely and important step in providing the world community with the international emergency service it desperately needs in order to fulfill its "responsibility to protect."

According to Global Action to Prevent War, the UN Emergency Peace Service (UNEPS) is being designed by a global partnership of NGOs, government representatives and UN officials as a standing, individually recruited, service integrated, gender mainstreamed service that can provide rapid response to outbreaks of genocide, crimes against humanity, and other humanitarian disasters.

The following topics will comprise the agenda of the Security Council. The agenda of the Security Council may be opened to any topic to cover emergency events at the motion of a member state:
1. Security Council Reform
2. Responsibility to Protect.

Modern Reform of the United Nations Security Council has revolved around 5 key issues:
-Categories of Membership
-Question of Veto Power
-Regional Representation
-Council Enlargement
-Working Methods of the Council

Even though the geopolitical realities changed drastically since 1945, when the set-up of the current Council was decided, the Security Council changed very little during this long period. The winners of Second World War shaped the Charter of the United Nations in their national interests, dividing the veto-power pertinent to the permanent seats amongst themselves. With the enlargement of the United Nations membership and increasing self-confidence among the new members, going hand in hand with processes of decolonization, old structures and procedures were increasingly challenged. The imbalance between the number of seats in the Security Council and the total number of member States became evident and the only significant reform of the Security Council came to pass in 1965 after the ratification
of two thirds of the membership, including the five permanent members of the Security Council (that have a veto right on Charter changes). The reform included an increase of the non-permanent membership from six to 10 members.

With Boutros Boutros-Ghali elected as Secretary-General in 1992, the reform discussions of the UN Security Council were launched again as he started his new term with the first-ever summit of the Security Council and thereafter published "An Agenda for Peace". His motivation was to restructure the composition and anachronistic procedures of the UN organ recognizing the changed world.

By 1992, Germany and Japan had become the second and third largest contributor to the United Nations and started to demand a permanent seat. Also Brazil (fifth largest country in terms of territory) and India (second largest country in terms of population) as the most powerful countries within their regional groups and key players within their regions saw themselves on a permanent seats. This Group of Four countries formed an interest group later known as the G4. On the other hand their regional rivals were opposed to the G4 becoming permanent members with a veto power. They favored the expansion of the non-permanent category of seats with members to be elected on a regional basis. Italy, Spain, Argentina, Canada, Mexico, South Korea and Pakistan started to form an interest group, known as the “Coffee Club” and later “Uniting for Consensus”.

Simultaneously, the African Group started to demand two permanent seats for themselves, on the basis of historical injustices and the fact that a large part of the Council’s agenda is concentrated on the continent. Those two seats would be permanent African seats, that rotate between African countries chosen by the African group.

The General Assembly Task Force on Security Council Reform has delivered a Report (on the question of equitable representation on and increase in the membership of the Security Council) recommending a compromise solution for entering intergovernmental negotiations on reform.

The report builds on existing transitional/intermediary approaches to suggest a “timeline perspective”. The “timeline perspective” suggests that Member States begin by identifying the negotiables to be included in short-term intergovernmental negotiations. Crucial to the “timeline perspective” is the scheduling of a mandatory review conference – a forum for discussing changes to any reforms achieved in the near-term, and for revisiting negotiables that cannot be agreed upon now.You can find a summary of the report at: http://www.reformtheun.org/index.php/eupdate/4290
 

Topic 2: Responsibility to Protect

The doctrine of The Responsibility to Protect (also referred to as R2P) addresses the principle of the “right of humanitarian intervention” and the question of when it is appropriate for states to take action, particularly military action, against another state for the purpose of protecting peoples at risk.

The Responsibility to Protect was adopted as an international norm at the 2005 World Summit where the United Nations General Assembly endorsed principles originating in the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The doctrine refers to the obligation of states to their populations and toward all populations at risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Under this norm, the primary responsibility to protect populations lies within the state itself, but when a state is either unable or unwilling to protect its people, responsibility lies in the international community. The 2005 World Summit Outcome document states that the international community should encourage and assist states in exercising responsibility to their populations and has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means to protect populations from genocide and other atrocities. Only after peaceful efforts and more coercive actions such as economic sanctions have shown to be inadequate, will the use of military force be considered by the Security Council.

While the principals of international humanitarian law date back to the Geneva Conventions in the late nineteenth century, controversy over R2P is largely centered around the issue of state sovereignty, the right of a state to control domestic issues within its borders and its government to control the use of force. Under the UN Charter, the threat or use of force among states is illegal with only two exceptions. States may use force in the case of self defense of an armed attack (Article 51) and in military measures authorized by the Security Council aimed at maintaining or restoring international peace and security after non-military means of coercion have been exhausted (Article 42). The use of force under the doctrine of R2P follows these principles of the Charter outlined in chapters VI, VII, and VIII.

For more information see:
The Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect at http://globalr2p.org/.
2005 World Summit Outcome, UN document A/60/L.1, paragraphs 138 and 139.
Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, http://www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca/report-en.asp.