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UN flags and logo.

Belga Photo Nicolas Maeterlinck via Reuters

Scandals and hope at the UN: Is it worth it?

What good is the United Nations in 2024?

With wars raging, AI disrupting, inequality growing, and climate change accelerating, UN Secretary-General António Guterres says that “a powder keg risks engulfing the world.”

That’s one reason why the GZERO team is paying close attention to a giant gabfest, where leaders like President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, policymakers, diplomats, and influencers from 193 countries have gathered this week to try to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems.

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Luisa Vieira

Graphic Truth: Biggest contributors to UN peacekeeping

UN Peacekeeping is all about helping countries navigate the often rocky transition out of violent conflict, with the hope of laying the groundwork for a lasting peace. For over 70 years, peacekeepers have been deployed around the world to help maintain security, protect civilians and human rights, and oversee peace processes. There are currently 11 active peacekeeping missions around the world.

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Can Zelensky's 'victory plan' bring peace to Ukraine?
- YouTube

Can Zelensky's 'victory plan' bring peace to Ukraine?

Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm, Sweden.

First question, is Zelensky's finalized 'victory plan' realistic to bring peace to Ukraine?

Well, the peace plan that he's talking about is a proposal that he's going to present to President Biden at the meeting in UN in the next few days. They are there for the UN General Assembly, and it consists essentially of beefing up Ukraine's military capabilities with the possibility to use more long-range weapons and other things in order to substantially increase the military difficulties that Russia already having. Thus, possibly, hopefully, making it certain, making it clear to the Kremlin that there's no way to victory and that they have to sit down and agree to something that is acceptable and that can be called peace of some sort. Will this work? Remains to be seen, to put it in the mildest possible way.

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Hello Kitty on the screens at the UN General Assembly

Riley Callanan

How it feels to be “the future” at the UN’s Summit of the Future

“What kind of world would you like to live in?” asked Hello Kitty – yes, the cartoon cat – before a group of youth leaders gathered in the UN’s General Assembly hall on Friday.

They were there to represent countries and causes at the Summit for the Future, a high-level meeting that culminated in the “grown-up” world leaders endorsing a 60-point Pact for the Future on Sunday.

That pact, adopted by the UN’s 193 member states, includes everything from a compact on AI governance, to urging countries to supercharge their sustainability efforts, to pushing for Africa’s inclusion on the Security Council, to devising a global governance framework for preventing war in outer space.

But a key part of the Pact is a “Declaration on Future Generations,” which promises to create “meaningful opportunities for young people to participate in the decisions that shape their lives, especially at the global level.”

And that’s where the UN, it seems, has a problem.

During the summit’s opening ceremony, Secretary-General António Guterres acknowledged that the underrepresentation of young people at the UN was an issue that the institution is keen to address.

As of 2022, only 3.7% of UN employees were under 30 years old. Guterres pledged to improve that, saying it is important to have young people “working [at the UN] daily, where the decisions are made, where ideas are born.”

The UN, he said, is putting mechanisms in place to “ensure that in the [UN] decision-making process, there are moments where there is an active intervention of young people, not just their consultation.”

But many young people felt that they should have been involved in the finalization of the Pact for the Future on Sunday, which they reported only involved UN stakeholders.

“Almost none of the youth delegates were really engaged in the process" of endorsing the pact, said Ukraine’s Youth Delegate to the UN, Yuri Lomikovskyi, age 22.“A declaration on youth participation was made without youth participation.”

He faulted the pact for repeating old initiatives and frameworks – like the Paris Agreement, the UN Charter, and the UN Declaration of Human Rights – without adding “mechanisms to actually make them happen, especially amidst modern challenges,” including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza wars, the climate emergency, and democratic backsliding around the world.

Josh Oxby, 26, the youth Global Focal Point for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal on energy, expressed a similar concern about accountability.

“It's all very well and good to commit to these ideas and to focus on meaningful engagement,” he said, “but the issue now is what can we do to hold it to account or challenge it in the future?”

These views represent a broader feeling among the youth delegates. In a live poll conducted during the event, only 3% of the 669 youth participants said they felt they had direct power in shaping the Pact’s agenda, with several accusing the UN of “youth-washing.”

The youth delegates said they felt valued, but only to a certain degree. “When there are young people in the room, we make the older generations think about their own families and kids, " says the UN’s youth development delegate Asma Rouabhia, 28, “but there is a feeling that because young people are not as experienced, we don’t really know what we are talking about.”

“I might not have all the technical knowledge, but I have the personal passion,” she added. Rouabhia became an energy advocate because insufficient energy access in her native Tunisia caused her mother to nearly freeze while giving birth to her.

The UN’s Assistant Secretary-General for Youth Affairs, Felipe Paullier, says that while polls show that young people have outsized faith in multilateralism, the UN “risks losing them if it is not conscious about the changes it needs to make structurally, to increase youth participation.”

“Fifty percent of the world’s population is under 30 years old,” says Paullier, “if [the UN] doesn’t make these changes, we are screwed.”

FILE PHOTO: UN General Assembly votes at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, U.S. May 23, 2024.

REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/File Photo

Can the UN save our future?

Today marks the first major day of the UN General Assembly, a forum where the UN’s 193 member states gather to debate global problems and work toward solutions. The event kicks off with the Summit of the Future — a two-day event that UN Secretary-General António Guterres says is a “once-in-a-generation chance” to reinvigorate international cooperation and forge a new global consensus on shaping our collective future.

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A permanent Security Council seat for Africa?

“We cannot accept that the world’s preeminent peace and security body lacks a permanent voice for a continent of well over a billion people — a young and rapidly growing population — making up 28 percent of the membership of the United Nations.” So said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Monday as he endorsed the idea of an African delegation becoming a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
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Annie Gugliotta

Does Palestine pass the state test?

Did Hamas score a big win at the United Nations, or was it actually a win for the much-maligned idea of the two-state solution?

Forgive yourself if you ignored the critical UN vote last week. Like the blaring horns on the streets of New York, many folks tune out the UN as meaningless background noise to the real action in global politics: sound and fury signifying bias. That is a mistake. The controversial May 9 vote on granting Palestine full membership to the UN bears real scrutiny. After all, in plain terms, the vote effectively means recognizing a Palestinian state.

The vote was supported by 143 of the 193 countries that make up the General Assembly – that’s more countries supporting this idea in 2024 than the last time something like this was voted on, back in 2012. Just seven months after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel, Palestine has won more support, not less. And Israel is more isolated, not less. Nine countries, including the US and Israel, voted no, but this next bit is telling: 25 countries, including Canada, abstained. This signals a major shift in Canadian policy, as it has historically voted “no” alongside the US.

What changed, and what exactly was the vote saying about who would represent the Palestine state if it was granted full status– the Palestinian Authority or Hamas? Can there be a Palestinian state with Hamas playing a role? Is the current Israeli government trying to kill the idea of a viable two-state solution?

To find out, I spoke with Canada’s Ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae.

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Women and children wait for food distribution from the United Nations World Food Programme in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, back in 2017.

REUTERS/Siegfried Modola/File Photo

South Sudan customs dispute taxes a long-suffering population

Even as three-quarters of South Sudan’s people face starvation, a squabble between the government and the UN over import taxes is leaving vital aid trucks stuck at the border.

The background: South Sudan’s trade ministry ordered this week that all goods trucks entering the East African country must pay a $300 tax. The measure was meant to ensure that the government got its share of revenue from imports that are often underbilled or misrepresented. There was supposed to be a carveout for UN aid vehicles, but if so, officials at the Ugandan border didn’t get the memo – at least not yet.

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