Remarks made at the “SECOND SOVEREIGNTY SUMMIT” July 29, 2024.
https://sovereigntysummit.org/the-sovereignty-summit-2/
STEFANO GENNARINI, JD, Vice President For Legal Studies At The Center For Family And Human Rights (C-Fam); C-Fam Representative at UN Headquarters In NYC
TRANSCRIPT:
STEFANO GENNARINI, JD: Thank you, Frank, and greetings to all the distinguished listeners and guests on this call. I just wanted to bring the attention to the Summit of the future. Essentially, it’s going to be the main theme of the General Assembly plenary this September, and there’s going to be three agreements that are going to be promulgated that are currently in negotiations, the first of which is something called the “Pact for the Future,” which is generally an agreement that’s sort of positioning the United Nations system for what will come after the expiry of the “2030 Agenda.” You may or may not know what the 2030 agenda is. It’s essentially a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 159 targets for action—international cooperation— and those expire in the year 2030. Here at the United Nations, we like to take the long view of things like all good bureaucrats, and the idea is to already start putting in motion the processes that will lead to the replacement of the 2030 agenda with something new or some form of continuation thereof. Many of you may have been familiar with the idea of the emergency platform, which is the most controversial proposal for the Summit of the Future. The idea, of course, of the Summit of the Future came from the Secretary General of the United Nations.
And already this kind of modus operandi, where the secretary general essentially proposes themes and the way forward for the organization and simply seeks to rubber stamp his decision through the approval of the General Assembly, is very much a controversial development for the United Nations system, where the secretary general was never understood to be some kind of CEO, have some kind of presidential role, but more of a secretarial role. That’s why he’s called to lead the organ of the United Nations called the Secretariat. But we have this new system where the secretary general essentially proposes summits, proposes themes, proposes resolutions, proposes areas for action and concern, and the Member States approve it. We’ve seen this repeatedly since the early 2000s. This is a very negative development in international cooperation, which undermines sovereignty and undermines the functioning of the United Nations as a system for cooperation between member states. And it makes it more of an organ of global governance because you have a CEO or presidential-type role for the secretary general. And that’s what we saw in the early proposals for the Summit of the Future. Essentially, the secretary general was proposing to establish outright an emergency platform or to have the ability to declare emergencies and organize the response to emergencies, very much as he did during the COVID pandemic, except this time with more power and more resources.
The response from member states has been pretty good, in terms that it’s very unlikely that there’s going to be an emergency platform created through the agreement this year. There’s been quite a lot of resistance to that idea, but there has been contemplation of the idea of an emergency platform down the line. And that’s the normal way that UN negotiations proceed. Many times, you know, the Secretariat will propose in UN reports something very outlandish, knowing full well that they can’t get it, but they’ll get a few steps toward it. And that’s what we’re going to likely see at the Summit pf the Future. We’re going to likely see the establishment of some kind of process to discuss an emergency platform for the United Nations. What that would look like is all completely still up for grabs. They’re going to be negotiating for the next week. The proposal on the table now is that the secretary general will come up with a proposal for member states. We have told member states that they shouldn’t give such a broad mandate to the secretary general and that they should rather lead the discussions themselves without having to follow the lead of the secretary general because the concept of emerging platforms is so rife for abuse it would concentrate so much power in the secretary general.
It would literally be something unprecedented. That’s with regard to the summit. The “Pact for the Future” is the principal concern. A part of the Pact for the Future will also be a “Declaration on Future Generations,” essentially the purpose of which seems to be mostly to position future generations as somehow stakeholders in the multilateral system. And the way they want to do that is by increasing channels for participation for young people in UN decision making. This is a way that, you know, progressives want to capitalize on the demographic at youth advantage of a lot of developing countries. And then, finally, there’s the “Global Digital Compact,” which is, in some ways, the most concerning of the agreements that are being negotiated. Of course, the reason for that is because the idea is to promulgate international standards for the regulation of artificial intelligence and other information technologies so that they align with human rights as defined, of course, by UN human rights experts and the UN system, whose recommendations are quite controversial.