In their commitment and passion for peace and justice, the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been standard-bearers of the principles that guide the United Nations; in their constant cajoling and needling, encouraging and lobbying, the NGOs have been the Greek chorus that forever reminds the UN and its member nations of their human and moral responsibilities.
In the spring of 1945, at the UN founding conference in San Francisco, 42 NGOs were invited to participate in the process. Their involvement at the creation was acknowledgment by UN founders of their contributions in areas that would concern the new international forum-human rights, peace and international trade, among others. Now, [more than] 50 years later, NGOs that have an official relationship with the United Nations number in the thousands. Meanwhile, thousands more, pursuing their special areas of interest, work in cooperation with the UN. Whether their link to the world body is official or unofficial, these on-the-ground groups help to extend the UN's influence to the farthest corners of the planet. At the same time, they give people from around the world a voice at the United Nations.
Some see NGOs as shrill advocates of narrow agendas, others as the keepers of the flame of such causes as human rights, disarmament and economic justice. Some within the United Nations regard them as pests who pursue delegates down the halls-or even scale the Secretariat walls, as members of Greenpeace have done. Others see NGOs as invaluable allies in advancing controversial issues. With increasing recognition, however, NGOs are considered credible and sophisticated sources of information, analysis and action in almost every policy area.
A look at the list of agencies of the United Nations gives a quick overview of the myriad issues and constituencies the UN is called upon to consider. Population control, disarmament, refugee and relief work, human rights, international trade and commerce, decolonization, peacekeeping, economic development, health and nutrition-the tasks the UN undertakes on a daily basis are virtually infinite, beyond the ability of one institution to carry out. In reality, few UN programs could be implemented and fewer still sustained without the assistance of nongovernmental organizations.
Sometimes the determined efforts of just one person can have an impact. While the delegates in San Francisco debated the official agenda, a passionately committed individual became, in effect, a one-man NGO and succeeded in making the United Nations heed his message and act on it. A professor at Yale Law School, Raphael Lemkin had been an adviser to the US prosecutor at the Nazi war crimes trials in Nuremberg. Members of his own family had been killed in the Holocaust. Appalled by the lack of enforceable laws that could be used to convict Nazis of crimes against groups of people, Lemkin introduced the word "genocide" into the English language. And through relentless lobbying in the halls of the United Nations, he saw that the term made its way into international law.
On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution that defined genocide as "the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups," and called upon Member States to legislate against it. Two years later the General Assembly adopted a convention outlawing genocide. It was under this convention that, in February 1995, a UN tribunal charged the Serbian commander of a concentration camp in Bosnia with the crime of genocide against Bosnian Muslims. The indictment was the first of its kind ever issued by an international tribunal.
Some of the first NGOs to work with the United Nations were those whose purpose was to develop public support for it. Most prominent among these is the World Federation of United Nations Associations, whose headquarters are in Geneva. Founded in 1946, it now has member associations in more than 80 countries. Its chapters sponsor international education campaigns, cultural exchanges and training programs for chapter leaders, all designed to advance the ideals of the United Nations.
One of the federation's largest members is the United Nations Association of the USA. Among its early leaders was Eleanor Roosevelt, who volunteered to work with the association when her term as US delegate to the United Nations ended in 1952. Among this group's many contributions was the multilingual tour-guide program at UN Headquarters in New York City. Every year, guides give nearly a half- million international visitors an inside look at their United Nations. UNA-USA counts among its supporters both ordinary citizens and giant corporations such as Boeing, Pepsico and IBM.
Religious organizations played a crucial role in supporting the fledgling United Nations-both during its creation and during the postwar years as the polarization of the world into ideological blocs imperiled the founders' sense of unity. In 1943, the United States Federal Council of Churches produced a document whose formal title was "Statement of Political Positions," but which was commonly known as the "Six Pillars of Peace." Almost all the ideas laid out in this document, which reflected earlier church efforts to assure a "just and durable peace," found their way into the draft proposals for a United Nations Charter developed in 1944 at Dumbarton Oaks.
John Foster Dulles, who had chaired the commission that drafted the "Six Pillars" statement, was a member of the US delegation to San Francisco. Reflecting on his UN experience, Dulles, who went on to become Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, observed, "It was the religious people who took the lead in seeking that the organization should be dedicated not merely to a peaceful but to a just order. It was they who sought that reliance should be placed upon the moral forces which could be reflected in the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council, and the Trusteeship Council rather than upon the power of a few militarily strong nations operating in the Security Council without commitment to any standards of law and justice."
The work of religious NGOs has covered a wide spectrum of issues that concern the United Nations. In the 1950s and early 1960s, for example, church-based NGOs joined with others to assure passage of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples. The involvement of NGOs in that issue was not limited to public forums or buttonholing delegates in the UN halls. It was often very down-to-earth and domestic. Cora Weiss, who now heads the Samuel Rubin Foundation and was at the time a volunteer for the American Committee on Africa, often housed people like Oliver Tambo, Kenneth Kaunda and Eduardo Mondlane at her New York City apartment, enabling the new generation of African leaders to make its case for independence.
After staying overnight at the Weiss home, the leaders would head over to the United Methodist Church's UN office on First Avenue. There, Mia Adjali, who now heads the international affairs department of the Women's Division, provided the telephones and typewriters they needed to prepare speeches and testimony for presentation at the UN General Assembly across the street. Methodist leaders themselves made a unique contribution to UN committee hearings on independence. In 1961, the Methodist bishop in Angola, Ralph Dodge, and his missionaries were expelled by the Portuguese colonial government. Credible information from inside Angola and other African countries was hard to come by and the United Nations welcomed the firsthand information these individuals could provide. Their testimony during hearings proved crucial to passage of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in 1960.
Nongovernmental organizations have shown their mettle in the battle for human rights, as well. NGOs and a handful of committed individuals pressed the delegates at San Francisco to include human rights as a goal for UN member nations. As a result, the Charter mandated the creation of a UN Commission on Human Rights (set up in 1946) and the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This landmark document, which for the first time outlined the basic rights and freedoms due every individual in every nation, was and remains the standard statement of principle used by NGOs around the world to promote human rights.
But despite the passage of the Universal Declaration and its legally binding Covenants, such human rights violations as torture, "disappearances" and arbitrary executions remain widespread and stand as a reminder of the limitations of formal declarations. Here again, the NGOs play a crucial supporting role. Groups like Vicaria de la Solidaridad in Chile, the Committee on the Administration of Justice in Northern Ireland and the Turkish Human Rights Association have worked independently to establish standards of behavior in their own countries. With the UN, they also push for compliance by other member nations.
These activists and NGOs, notably Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, seek to make sure that human rights remain high on the UN's agenda. Curt Goering of Amnesty International USA points out that human rights NGOs serve as a gadfly, gathering evidence that will "expose the gap between rhetoric and action" among UN member nations.
It is often a dangerous undertaking. In 1990, Sebastian Velasquez Mejia, who worked with a rural human rights group in Guatemala, was kidnapped; his battered corpse was found in Guatemala City a few days later. Three witnesses who identified members of the responsible paramilitary group were shot three months later and two were killed. Every year, hundreds of human rights activists the world over are killed and hundreds more imprisoned.
In addition to being among the most committed of advocates, human rights groups are among the most sophisticated. Developing critical investigative reports and legal analysis of human rights issues, they work closely with the United Nations to ratify international treaties and conventions that give clear legal force to the Universal Declaration. Among the successes in which they have collaborated, at times by prodding the UN and member nations, are the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child and provisions to enforce guidelines regarding torture, extrajudicial executions and "disappearances." NGOs are also credited with the creation in 1993 of a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a position whose goal is to centralize the rights activities carried out by UN agencies and coordinate their work with outside organizations.
Few if any of the UN's many refugee and relief services could function effectively without the active involvement of NGOs large and small. Among those whose names are recognized worldwide are the International Rescue Committee, the International Red Cross, CARE, Medecins sans Frontieres, Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services. Then there are the innumerable grassroots groups, like the Organization of Rural Associations for Progress in Zimbabwe and the Association of Development Agencies in Bangladesh.
Robert P. DeVecchi, president of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), describes the connection between the NGOs and the UN as "a marriage of necessity. The UN cuts the red tape and provides funds for NGOs. We provide the services." In Nicaragua, for example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sponsored a repatriation program in the early 1990s that included funds for rebuilding infrastructure. Using UNHCR monies for materials, a local NGO, Fadcani, volunteered the labor to rebuild a bridge across the Tuapi River that allowed returning refugee farmers to bring their products to market.
The bond between relief NGOs and the United Nations was strengthened in the mid-1970s in response to the exodus of refugees from Southeast Asia. Before then, UNHCR had been a relatively small-scale operation whose primary responsibility was to provide legal protection for displaced persons. The boat people of the post-Vietnam War era and the flood of refugees from Laos and Cambodia created a refugee problem of unprecedented magnitude, requiring more resources, services and coordination than NGOs alone could muster. UNHCR became the central organizer, working with NGOs to assist refugees with humanitarian aid and to arrange the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Later, the 14-year-long war in Afghanistan caused the long-term dislocation of some 6 million refugees and resettlement of 2 to 3 million -one of the largest refugee movements in history. As a result of such catastrophic dislocations, NGOs were compelled to go beyond providing emergency services to set up education, health and training services for populations forced to live outside their homelands for years on end.
For example, in 1990, after civil war forced thousands of Liberians to seek refuge in neighboring Guinea, the IRC recruited 1,120 former teachers among the refugees to set up a school system for 60,000 exiled children, more than are in the school system of West Virginia. In 1993, as a result of such massive efforts-and of expectations that more would be required in years to come-the UN High Commissioner for Refugees launched a yearlong review of the NGOs' work, meeting with some 450 NGOs in Caracas, Katmandu, Tunis, Bangkok, Addis Ababa and Budapest, as well as in Canada, Japan and the United States. The review culminated in a 1994 declaration establishing closer working ties with NGOs and a commitment to provide further support for their efforts.
With demand for their work increasing worldwide over the past decade, nongovernmental organizations have gained greater credibility and influence. Along with their assertiveness, their numbers have grown. In 1978, the UN accredited 300 NGOs; now it registers thousands. Regions in which nongovernmental activity had for years been underground or virtually nonexistent, such as in Asia and Eastern Europe, have witnessed the proliferation of NGOs responding to social issues that national governments are sometimes ill-equipped or reluctant to address. Meanwhile, sophisticated global communications have made it easier for even the most remote NGOs to share information.
In many cases, the issues themselves have demanded the unique contribution of NGOs, with their far-reaching constituencies, their ability to exchange and pool information and the financial and technical resources they may have at their disposal. This year, the International Court of Justice has taken up the case of whether the use of nuclear weapons-or even the threat to use them-is illegal under international law. This case would never have come before the court were it not for a nearly 10-year international grassroots campaign by nongovernmental organizations to convince the General Assembly to take up the issue.
The campaign required extensive lobbying of some 83 UN delegations by NGOs, coordination of grassroots public support in every continent and the expertise of legal and health professionals from dozens of countries. Only nongovernmental organizations had the knowledge, contacts, international reach and abiding commitment to have carried out this battle.
Keenly aware of the limitations of government leadership in environmental issues, Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, encouraged NGOs to attend what was popularly known as the Earth Summit. Held in Rio de Janeiro, the Earth Summit was the largest conference in the UN's history. In addition to the representatives of the governments of 178 nations, nearly 1,500 NGOs were officially accredited to the conference by the United Nations. While they and the governmental representatives convened in a convention center outside the city, hundreds of other NGOs held their own Global Forum in a park in downtown Rio.
There, groups ranging from Greenpeace International and the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation to the Nairobi-based Green Belt Movement and Japan's Citizens' Alliance for Saving the Atmosphere and the Earth shared ideas and rallied support for conference proposals or coordinated critiques of them.
Whatever else it achieved, the Earth Summit helped to forge a closer connection between the United Nations and NGOs and stimulated the growth of these energetic, energizing citizens' groups. The March 1995 World Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen accredited the highest number of NGOs to date-more than 2,000. Thousands of women's NGOs, which have been invaluable contributors in a wide spectrum of issues and the most successful lobbyists at recent UN conferences, were involved in the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in September 1995.
Today UN observers are looking more closely at NGOs for answers to some of the problems facing the world body. Their flexibility, the breadth and depth of their constituencies, the resources they are able to muster-all are qualities that benefit the United Nations. In the face of rapidly changing global politics, UN officials have been willing to reach out to all of the forces that can assist them in their mission and have undertaken an extensive review of the UN's working relationship with NGOs. Its starting point is acknowledgment of the essential contribution NGOs make to the United Nations.
By: Karen Polk, (excerpt from Nongovernmental Organizations), from: A Global Affair: An Inside Look at the United Nations, published by Jones and Janello, copyright 1995, all rights reserved.
