Prof. Enrique Javier Díez Gutiérrez
University of León – SPAIN
The United Nations (UN) has been captured. World peace and human dignity are held hostage in New York. Currently, the UN has become an instrument of U.S. domination. That is why we must rescue this international organization from its captivity.
The UN can be considered the first ever effort to build a system of collective security and global governance. The UN embodies the historical dream to create an international system that places the collective interest and the common good at the center, over national interests and economic power agendas, and that discards the use of war as an instrument of international relations.
The UN, replacing the League of Nations, was founded by 51 countries on October 24, 1945 in San Francisco, California. Supposedly, it was created to facilitate cooperation in international law, international peace and security, economic and social development, humanitarian affairs and human rights. Nowadays, the Organization is comprised of 195 countries and continues with practically the same structure and the same anti-democratic functioning.
The UN responds to an outdated institutional architecture that reflects the international order that emerged 75 years ago; national interests still play a dominant role in important decision-making processes; it has not been able to prevent growing inequalities between and within States, despite economic growth; it lacks enforcement mechanisms to convert its resolutions into action and its recommendations into measures; and the Security Council has hardly evolved at all, with the loss of credibility that this entails.
The United Nations (UN) is really being held hostage. World peace and human dignity are held hostage in New York. Currently, the UN has become an instrument of U.S. domination. That is why we must rescue this international organization from its captivity.
The United States has turned the United Nations into its private domain, an instrument at the service of its multinationals and power groups, and has distorted the ideals embodied in the founding charter: its mission to preserve peace and security through the promotion of development and human rights.
Having the headquarters of the Organization located in New York resulted in the United States taking in billions of dollars from the expenses incurred by the UN Secretariat and all its agencies and bodies, as well as those of diplomats around the world.
The United States, in addition, enjoys the privilege of being the only country for which a maximum limit has been established on the contribution it must pay to the Organization’s budget. On top of this, the imperialist government has incurred in a longterm delay in the payment of its reduced financial contribution. Far from losing its rights within the Organization due to this non-payment, as required by the San Francisco Charter for such cases, the UN negotiated with its largest debtor: The United States paid part of what was due, and the UN reduced the amount of its already reduced quota, committing itself to make changes in its administrative management that would favor the U.S. blackmailing government even more.
For this reason, it is not surprising that military interventions have been decided or allowed from this space, which have submitted countries and regions of the world to long periods of war and destabilization. The most recent barbarism, the genocide in Gaza, is the culmination of Zionist apartheid over the Palestinian people for the last 75 years. However, the United States is one of the five countries sitting on the Security Council that has the undemocratic right of veto, and it will obviously never allow its protected ally (Israel) to receive any punishment, even if the International Criminal Court of Justice (ICJ) condemns it for genocide.
Responding to this sentence for crimes against humanity, the U.S. empire seeks to divert attention from this new Palestinian Holocaust by suspending funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), arguing that it is true what the Zionist regime of Israel claims: that members of this agency are „terrorists“1. And most seriously, this lie, which has been repeated in all its media and amplified by the media at the service of western countries, has caused nine other countries, satellites of US colonial interests, to also suspend their funding to UNRWA.
This is the only organization helping the Palestinian population in the face of the Zionist barbarism that has already murdered more than 26,000 Palestinians, from children to the elderly, doctors, teachers, etc., and that is systematically torturing the rest of the population through displacement, kidnappings, rape and even through siege by hunger and thirst, leaving them without food and water.
Because of all this and because of the long history of inactivity and servitude to the interests of the United States, there are many countries that have repeatedly called for deep changes in the United Nations and the removal of its headquarters from the imperial kidnapping in the United States, so that it can truly be an organization that represents all member countries equally. But critical voices are always silenced or ignored; a single vote against, from those who have the right to veto, is enough for any attempt at reform to be shamefully overturned.
It is not acceptable that the tyranny with which the UN operates should condition the lives of the vast majority of the world’s population. It is totally unacceptable that five countries – among them the United States, which is the one that most often uses the fascist tool of using the veto – can ignore the decisions taken by the other 190 countries.
Therefore, we ask and demand, as a first and essential step, the transfer of the UN out of the borders of the United States, to rescue it from its captivity and embargo by the U.S. imperial power. As long as the UN does not escape from this geopolitical captivity and is not radically transformed to build an Organization in which all countries have a voice and a vote, and the resolutions adopted cannot be vetoed by the powerful, the UN cannot be considered to be fulfilling its founding charter and serving the objectives for which it was created.
Enrique Javier Díez Gutiérrez.
Professor at the University of León (Spain) and author of Pedagogía del Decrecimiento (2024, Ed. Octaedro); Memoria Histórica Democrática de las Mujeres (2023, Ed. Plaza y Valdés), “Pedagogía Antifascista” (2022, Ed. Octaedro) y La Historia Silenciada (2022, Ed. Plaza y Valdés).
* This article is published simultaneously in PoliTeknik International and PoliTeknik Español.
