By: Peter Smith; he followed the 3rd Committee in November 2023
The UN was set up at the end of WW2 to prevent another world war. This was to includes the Security Council who could decide to go to war as in Korea (1950) and against Iraq (1990).
The other main part of the UN is the General Assembly ( G.A.) which consists of 192 countries. This has six functional committees:
- Disarmament
- Economic, Financial, Population
- Social, Cultural , Humanitarian , Human Rights
- Decolonisation
- Administrative, budget
- Legal issues
I have been following the 3rd Committee (3 Com ) of the GA for nearly 30 years, as this is the most dangerous part of the UN for family and pro-life issues. This committee is at the forefront of the battle to make abortion a human right, and to promote LGBTQ+ issues. For a good summary of battles over the years go to:
https://c-fam.org/event/the-history-of-pro-life-negotiations-at-the-un/
Now the GA as well as 3 Com have a one country one vote system for any resolution. However, there was traditionally a system of consensus where if 3 or more delegations objected that wording was deleted. This system was abandoned at the 1994 Cairo Population Conference, by the Clinton Administration. Then two dozen countries would object, and they were told to post a reservation at the end of the meeting. This was the new consensus. There is rarely a vote at the UN except on very contentious issues.
I have just spent two weeks monitoring 3Com resolutions. There were 62 resolutions this session with 523 reservations or explanations of position. So, it is a sick joke to claim there is consensus at the UN on certain contentious issues. Many resolutions are adopted with no vote and no reservations, so you are looking at say two dozen objections to each of the bad resolutions.
There was the usual arguments on Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights. The pro-abortion countries wanting it even in the safe drinking water resolution and the pro-life countries saying there was no international right to abortion.
Then when the term gender (first introduced in 1995 at the Beijing women’s conference) was mentioned in a document the conservative countries , and as always the Holy See said it was just biological : male and female. The E.U. and the other “developed “countries like the term gender as a social construct. These latter countries were pushing the term “women in all their diversity”. A quick google search says this included transgender women (men pretending to be women).
One of the newer bits of bad language is “multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination. “To my mind this is the main plank of the woke, neo-Marxist philosophy that the world is full of oppressors and the oppressed. White straight me being the worst oppressors. And if you are for example a black lesbian with a limp you are the most oppressed and need lots of government assistance.
The most insidious and evil aspect of the UN is the leftist concept of developing customary international law. The oldest of these and good uses of it are diplomatic immunity. You must let an enemy ambassador into your country to negotiate a surrender. This type of law goes back to at least the ancient Greeks. But now some liberal law professors claim you can make customary international law just by repeating a vague concept in UN documents over a few decades. This is a very dangerous aspect of the UN in general and 3Com in particular. Many leftist Judges in many countries are trying this on to claim all sorts of rights. Such as the right to abortion, right to gay marriage, right to claim you are a different sex , etc.
On a positive note, there was a good resolution on the family, and this passed without a vote and only 4 countries objecting. There is a group of countries called Friends of the Family, a total of 25 members. Pray that more will join this group and that more countries will speak up for life and the family.
Peter Smith represents CCI at the UN in New York