June 6, 2024 (New York, FSMUN) – Today the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) elected 16 Vice Presidents, including the Federated States of Micronesia, to serve at its 79th session, lasting from September 2024 until September 2025. The Vice-Presidents are nominated by the UN regional groups and Micronesia is one of five countries representing the Asia-Pacific region.
The Vice Presidents of the General Assembly are chosen to serve by country rather than by individual. However, it is often the duty of the Permanent Representative to serve in that capacity. Duties include chairing of meetings in the absence of the President of the General Assembly (PGA) and participating in meetings of the General Committee, which oversees the General Assembly’s agenda. This is Micronesia’s first time to be elected as a Vice President or to any high-level position at the United Nations since attaining membership in the organization in 1991.
End the United Nations/World Economic Forum Partnership Agreement.
We are very concerned that this WEF-UN partnership agreement will de-legitimize the United Nations and provide transnational corporations preferential and deferential access to the UN System. The UN system is already under a big threat from the US Government and those who question a democratic multilateral world. However, this corporatization of the UN poses a much deeper long-term threat, as it will reduce public support for the UN system in the South and the North.
It is our strong belief that this agreement is fundamentally at odds with the UN Charter and with intergovernmental decisions on sustainable development, the climate emergency, and the eradication of poverty and hunger. This public-private partnership will permanently associate the UN with transnational corporations, some of whose core essential activities have caused or worsened the social and environmental crises that the planet faces. This is a form of corporate capture. We know that agribusiness destroys biodiversity and sustainable and just food systems, oil and gas corporations endanger the world’s climate, Big Pharma weakens access to essential medications, extractive corporations leave lasting damage to countries’ ecologies and peoples, and arms manufacturers profit from local and regional wars as well as repression of social movements. All these sectors are significant actors within the World Economic Forum.
The provisions of the strategic partnership effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions embedded in public interest and transparent democratic procedures. The WEF agreement with the UN, and all other forms of corporate capture, seriously undermines the mandate of the UN as well as the independence, impartiality and effectiveness of this multilateral body, particularly in relation to the protection and promotion of human rights. For example, in the current discussions on a Treaty to regulate business activities, corporate capture of the UN – or undue interference by corporations on the UN – is weakening and compromising its ability as a multilateral body of government to hold businesses to account. Similarly, companies are increasingly making financial threats on governments and the UN when mandates are working on corporate accountability, the OHCHR mandate of the UN database on business in/with Israeli settlements is one example.
The UN’s acceptance of this partnership agreement moves the world toward WEF’s aspirations for multistakeholderism becoming the effective replacement of multilateralism. WEF in their 2010 The Global Redesign Initiative argued that the first step toward their global governance vision is ‘to redefine the international system as constituting a wider, multifaceted system of global cooperation in which intergovernmental legal frameworks and institutions are embedded as a core, but not the sole and sometimes not the most crucial, component.” The goal was to weaken the role of states in global decision-making and to elevate the role of a new set of ‘stakeholders’, turning our multilateral system into a multistakeholder system, in which companies are part of the governing mechanisms. This would bring transnational corporations, selected civil society representatives, states and other non-state actors together to make global decisions, discarding or ignoring critical concerns around conflicts of interest, accountability and democracy.
We call instead for strengthening peoples’ sovereignty, deepening democratic multilateralism and countering the further expansion of multistakeholderism. Public interest civil society organizations and social movements have played crucial roles in upholding human rights and environmental agreement and in the development of intergovernmental positions on a wide range of global crises over the past 75 years. To strengthen public support for the UN system for its next 75 years, we believe that your office as well the executive offices of the specialized agencies should host public consultations on the future institutional role and engagement mechanism with the most affected communities and organizations of the people, including among others women, workers, peasants, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ , human rights defenders, educators, youth, and scholars. These communities which are human rights holders and are committed to preserving the common wellbeing of people and the environment; as well as to building a stronger, independent, and democratic international governance system must be treated differently from “stakeholders” who only have profit at stake.
UN should adopt effective mechanisms that can prevent cases of conflict of interest consistently throughout the entire system. Any policy in this regard should bear in mind the different roles of private interest and of rights-holders that look after common goods and benefits. Those private interests whose activities are in conflict with UN goals and objectives should not be involved with intergovernmental bodies or the Secretariat, whose focus should be always be on protecting common goods and providing global public benefits.
Mr Secretary-General, electing to build an alliance between the Secretariat and transnational corporations to save the UN system from those hostile to multilateralism and decreasing public funding, will destroy the UN system, not save it.
Thank you for your comment. Please state your name and who are we you’re referring to. Please don’t hesitate to resend your email to welles@fsmgov.org so I can relay your message to the Ambassador. However, I need to know which group you belong to that is concern with WEF.
Kalahngan