Advancing Human Dignity: Forging Partnerships for Better Lives Through the United Nations

(As Prepared for Delivery)

Not only does the United States respect and work to advance the same ideals that have been the touchstones of the United Nations since its creation, but we recognize the basic ways that the United States and other nations derive tangible, practical foreign policy advantages from working through the UN.

For instance, the Untied Nations and multilateral organizations offer leverage and burden-sharing. International organizations can serve as "force multipliers," bringing the resources of the international community to bear on problems that no one country could resolve on its own. UN peacekeeping missions are a good example - UN peacekeeping operations around the world are supported by financial contributions from all 192 Member States and troop contributions from 108 Member States. That means that the Untied States or no one power is involved in this peacekeeping role, but that instead it's shared.

Legitimacy is also a very practical benefit of multilateral action. It's not just the resource question of the force multiplier, but also a moral question, a question of political legitimization. Action pursued through multilateral fora, and particularly through the United Nations, may carry authority that unilateral action, or action through ad hoc arrangements, does not. Security Council decisions, for example, are legally binding on Member States and carry strong moral weight.

Multilateral action also offers access. International organizations can work in countries where the U.S., or other nations, may not have programs or may have a limited presence. For example, former UN Under Secretary for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari twice visited Burma and met with the famous opposition leader Aun San Suu Kyi, who is under house arrest in Burma. That is something the Untied States or many other actors in the international community cannot do.

There is expertise in international fora, as international organizations often have special expertise or a standing capacity to address problems that individual member states do not. For example, the International Telecommunication Union coordinates the launching of satellites, and the International Bureau of Weights and Measures is responsible for the synchronizing of international time standards.

Finally, there is the coordination offered by international organizations, which can facilitate agreements between many countries simultaneously. For example, the Universal Postal Union facilitates cross-border mail service. If the U.S. and Belgium were not members of the UPU, each of our two countries would have to conclude bilateral postal agreements with more than 200 postal administrations worldwide.

There are without a doubt concrete, practical reasons for working through multilateral organizations. The U.S. recognizes these benefits and will continue to work through and with the United Nations on important foreign policy goals.

But working through the United Nations is not solely about practicality. Policy is shaped by the parameters of practicality, but it is inspired by moral imperatives. I referred to the founding ideals of the United Nations at the outset of my remarks, and I'll return to them now. However practical U.S. participation in the UN may be, we never lose sight that our participation is in the service of higher goals.

The United States is committed to the founding ideals of the United Nations. We believe that it serves a vital purpose, providing a forum where nations can work together to advance the original goals of the UN - peace, human rights, prosperity, and public health for all people. These ideals are best achieved through an effective UN that is equipped to address the challenges of the 21^st century.

The preamble of the UN charter reaffirms the "dignity and worth of the human person," and today I'd like to talk about how the United States works through the United Nations to address one higher goal in particular -- advancing human dignity.

Advancing Human Dignity Through the UN

Dag Hammarskjold, UN Secretary General from 1953 to 1961, wrote in his journals, published in 1964, that "The only kind of dignity which is genuine is that which is not diminished by the indifference of others." Human dignity should not have to stand up to the indifference of others. The international community not only can, but must, work to stop assaults on human dignity around the world.

The U.S. government takes this commitment seriously. While some participants in the U.S. domestic political debate on the United Nations may malign the UN -- and I'll get to what we're doing on that front a little later -- some problems, by their very nature, require a multilateral response. For example, transnational problems like HIV/AIDS, the threat of avian flu, and human trafficking all cross borders and can rarely be addressed by one country acting alone.

The perpetrators of mass atrocities or genocide, as an another example, must know that their actions trigger the moral condemnation of the world community, and that countries will follow that condemnation with concrete action to stop the genocide, to stop ethnic cleansing, to stop crimes against humanity. From a practical standpoint, one country alone may not have the right combination of sticks and carrots to stop the constant warfare in a place like Darfur, but many countries working together might.

UN priorities in addressing human dignity are not always defined by spiking or suddenly emerging threats like pandemic disease or spiraling violence. Sometimes they are defined by longstanding and endemic problems that confront us just as much with the sense that human dignity is being undercut. The World Food Program, for example, may provide food to a hungry family in a country where there is chronic food insecurity, while the UN Democracy Fund (first proposed by President Bush) can give people the ability to affect the political course of their countries by strengthening civil society, and the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) advances rights that should be equally extended to all members of a society, regardless of gender. These are endemic, longstanding issues, but they relate to human dignity.

Let me describe in a little more detail how the United States works through the United Nations to address the issues I've just touched on -- transnational threats to global health; human trafficking; genocide in Darfur; feeding the hungry; and promoting democracy, civil society, and women's rights.

Each of these rests on the proposition that no person should be dehumanized by disease, sexual exploitation, ethnic cleansing, hunger, or denial of an equal voice in their government.

On each, we form partnerships to promote a better life for those whose dignity is being violated - whose humanity is being degraded. We form partnerships with other governments, NGOs, and notably, international organizations. We try to offer multilateral leadership to galvanize effective, tangible action.

Transnational Health Issues: Avian Flu and HIV/AIDS

Without a basic, minimum level of health, citizens of the world are unable to do so many of the things that contribute to their dignity as human beings -- to create or support a family, earn a livelihood, or engage in the civic life of their communities.

The United States is working through the United Nations to address two of the gravest threats to global health -- the emerging threat of pandemic avian influenza, and the already-established scourge of HIV/AIDS.

Health issues in the multilateral architecture are addressed primarily through the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), as well as the UN Joint Program on AIDS (UNAIDS), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

First, let us look at bird flu. In the forefront of global efforts to combat the spread of avian influenza are the UN System Influenza Coordinator and WHO, along with other international organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). They are also preparing for a possible human pandemic if the virus mutates and becomes easily transmissible to humans.

Recognizing that close coordination among UN agencies and affected countries is critical, President Bush launched the International Partnership on Avian and Pandemic Influenza (IPAPI) at the UN General Assembly in September 2005. In March 2006, President Bush created the position of Special Representative on Avian and Pandemic Influenza, to work with international partners to prevent a pandemic.

As of December 2006, the United States has pledged $434 million to support international efforts to combat avian influenza along three pillars: preparedness and communication; surveillance and detection; and response and containment.

On HIV/AIDS, the United States is working closely with the UN system and the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a five-year, $15 billion commitment to fight AIDS around the globe.

The Global Fund -- just to clarify -- is not a UN program, but rather an independent body headquartered in Geneva. Through PEPFAR, the U.S. has pledged approximately $2.3 billion to the Global Fund through 2008. This represents the largest single funding commitment from any source.

In the United Nations system, the key player is the Joint Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), which coordinates the UN System's efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. UNAIDS also tracks the epidemic, builds political support for combating it, and facilitates development of country-driven efforts to fight HIV/AIDS so that they set up strategies to deal with the problem of HIV/AIDS that fit the social and economic situation in their country. For example, UNAIDS will provide, upon request, technical assistance to countries on how to write grant applications to the Global Fund.

UNAIDS also actively promotes three concepts and that are called the "Three Ones" -- one country-level coordinating authority, one national plan to fight AIDS, and one set of standards for evaluation. It takes a lead in monitoring and evaluation in particular, to see how well the efforts to combat HIV/AIDS are working. UNAIDS also, importantly, plays an NGO-like role as an advocate for increased awareness of challenges related to HIV/AIDS. For instance, UNAIDS has been a leader in focusing on the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where in a post-conflict situation, violence and rape perpetuate and proliferate HIV/AIDS. On the one hand, you have the terrible scourge of violence and war facilitating, on the other hand, the awful spread of HIV/AIDS. UNAIDS shed light on this connection.

As an advocate for strong action, sometimes UNAIDS is able to shine the international spotlight on problems. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, several UN agencies are working together under UNAIDS leadership to protect women from the violence and rape that also exposes them to increased risk of HIV/AIDS.

The U.S. was one of the leaders in creating UNAIDS. More than ten UN agencies and organizations have HIV/AIDS programs, so coordination to avoid redundancy is crucial. For example, UNESCO has an HIV/AIDS education program, and UNICEF helps children orphaned as a result of the disease. All their work must be coordinated.

The United States is on of the largest donors to UNAIDS, providing, through PEPFAR, approximately 20% ($29.7 million in 2006) of UNAIDS' all-voluntary budget. The U.S. also supports HIV/AIDS programs throughout the UN system through our regular budget contributions to UN programs and agencies.

The World Food Program

Much like health, and closely related to it, robbing a person of the ability to feed himself and his family is a fundamental assault on human dignity. It is a moral imperative for the world community to come to the aid of those who, whether because of a natural disaster, unremitting warfare, or the economic mismanagement of a corrupt regime, are unable to meet this most basic of human needs on their own.

The U.S. is the largest contributor to the World Food Program, which is funded entirely through voluntary contributions from member states. In 2006, we provided 44 percent of the total contributions to WFP (for a total U.S. contribution of $1.2 billion).

In 2005, the most recent year for which this figure is available, WFP provided food aid to 96.7 million people in 82 countries.

In Darfur, more than two million people have been displaced by violence. WFP battles insecurity and bad roads to get food to them every month. After a devastating earthquake struck Pakistan and Kashmir in 2005, killing almost 80,000 and leaving nearly 2.5 million homeless, WFP reached one million survivors and guaranteed winter food supplies for hundreds of thousands in remote mountain communities. WFP also responded quickly with food aid following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, feeding 2.24 million survivors.

Often, the U.S. is addressing hunger in situations where people have become refugees or internally displaced. The majority of refugees are women and children, as the male populations in these conflict areas are primarily combatants, jailed, or deceased.

Through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United States spends between $50 and $70 million each year on programs to provide primary health care, education, livelihoods, food and nutrition, clean water and sanitation, as well as prevention and response to gender-based violence.

The U.S. will continue to shoulder a large burden to combat hunger, and we need greater European help in this UN partnership.

Genocide in Darfur

Let me turn now to the world's most acute human rights calamity today: Darfur. Driven from their homes, slaughtered or raped based on ethnicity, non-Arab Darfurians have been robbed of any shred of dignity as brothers and sisters of humankind.

President Bush happened to be the first world leader to call the situation in Darfur a genocide in September 2004, but terminology isn't everything. What matters in the human cost. President Bush was also the first head of state to call for UNSC action on Darfur.

U.S. leadership helped secure the passage of UNSC resolution 1706 in August 2006. UNSCR 1706 calls for a multinational United Nations force to deploy to Darfur.

While the U.S. is sometimes maligned as unilateralist and skeptical of the UN, President Bush and the U.S. have been the chief advocate for a UN peacekeeping operation as an essential element of stemming the human suffering in Darfur.

I ask you to step back from stereotypes for a minute. The United States is sometimes maligned as unilateralist. The United States is seen as skeptical, compared to the Europeans, about the UN. But in fact in this most important case of fighting for human dignity, President Bush and the United States have been the chief advocates of the UN peacekeeping operation as an essential element of stemming the human suffering in Darfur.

We're working with partners to suggest that the role of the African Union in Darfur is heroic, but not enough. The world community needs to step in through a UN peace operation, if only the government of Sudan would let in those peacekeepers.

In short, our three main policy priorities in Darfur are the immediate transition to a hybrid African Union-UN peacekeeping force in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1706; a political settlement for the Darfur crisis; and the protection of non-combatants from further abuses and atrocities

The U.S. has been working through diplomatic channels to encourage contributions from Troop Contributing Countries (TCCs) to the hybrid AU/UN peacekeeping force.

Andrew Natsios, President Bush's Special Envoy on Sudan, recently traveled to China. His mission was to encourage the Chinese to use their particular combination of carrots and sticks to prompt Sudanese president Bashir to accept a hybrid force. This is critical because President Bashir's consent would help significantly with troop recruitment for the hybrid force.

We need Europe's help to urge China to act like a responsible global stakeholder and use its influence constructively with Sudan's government to stop Khartoum's sponsorship of ethnic cleansing in Darfur. The African Union forces currently deployed to Sudan would form the core of a UN force, but they are overmatched by the challenges they currently face - 7,200 of them, with very little mobility, are responsible for patrolling an area twenty-two times larger than Belgium, with difficult terrain and an inhospitable climate.

The U.S. has been a leader in providing humanitarian assistance -- particularly food aid -- to Sudan and the Darfur refugees in Chad, throughout Sudan's two-decade civil war and since the start of the Darfur conflict. Since fiscal year 2004, the U.S. has contributed more than $2 billion for humanitarian programs in Sudan and Eastern Chad

As the September 2005 World Summit Communiqué of Heads of States established for all governments, the Sudanese government has responsibility to protect its citizens, and the UN must press it to do so, and indeed to stop actively promoting the treatment of black Darfurians as subhuman by Arabs. Where it fails or refuses, the world community must step in, in the name of human dignity.

Human Trafficking

The dignity of victims of human trafficking is under assault from the moment they become trapped in a trafficking situation. Unable to escape, forced to work without compensation - and, in the case of victims of sexual exploitation, forced to do the most demeaning work imaginable -- victims of trafficking are modern-day slaves. Trafficking is a transnational problem that knows no borders, and it is the responsibility of the community of nations to combat this scourge.

Since 2001, the United States has provided approximately $375 million to support anti-trafficking efforts in over 120 countries, including pilot projects to address demand for sex trafficking victims. Of these funds, $19.2 million have gone to support UN anti-trafficking programs.

The United States is a signatory to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (also known as the Palermo Protocol), which the Senate ratified in October 2005.

The U.S. regularly works on anti-trafficking resolutions introduced by other governments within the UN General Assembly and the Crime Commission.

For instance, at the 2005 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), I worked to promote a U.S. resolution on how demand, particularly for commercial sexual exploitation, fuels human trafficking. The resolution was adopted unanimously in this small body of the UN, with over 50 co-sponsors.

We are also closely monitoring the UN's efforts to prevent its peacekeepers from engaging in trafficking, sexual exploitation and abuse of local communities in conflict and post-conflict areas of the world. UN peacekeepers in post-conflict situations should be reducing human suffering, not compounding it. The UN's credibility as a worldwide defender of peace depends on fixing this problem.

Promoting Civil Society Through the UN Democracy Fund

We combat human trafficking by building rule of law. A culture of lawfulness is connected to a larger initiative to further civic participation. The right to chart the political course of one's community or country is inextricably linked to one's inherent dignity as a person.

President Bush first called for the creation of the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) during his address the UN General Assembly in September 2004. The Fund's mission would be to strengthen civil society around the world, with a focus on nations emerging from conflict or otherwise in the beginning stages of democratization.

The international community warmly received the proposal. India co-sponsored UNDEF's creation and provided an early equal pledge with the United States of $10 million each in September 2005. The U.S. has since donated an additional $8 million to UNDEF, and more is on the way.

Other countries quickly stepped forward, with contributors including Australia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Qatar, Senegal and Sri Lanka bringing the total available for disbursement to more than $50 million by the middle of 2006. Japan has also just pledged $10 million. We encourage the EU to increase is support of this partnership, as well.

Late last year, UNDEF began disbursing funds to 125 grantees. More than 60 percent of the grantees are civil society organizations; the others are UN, regional, and governmental organizations.

Examples of UNDEF grantees and projects are instructive (and many advance women's empowerment so that women enjoy equal dignity to men). In India, a local NGO will work to increase the participation of traditionally marginalized women in state and national electoral politics. The Democratic Republic of the Congo held its first elections in over 40 years in 2006. To build on that success, a regional NGO will train women and men from parliament, the executive, civil society, media, and the private sector on a range of issues including human rights, democratic governance, rule of law, and leadership. In Afghanistan, a local NGO will provide leadership training and support directly to 1,200 rural Islamic and women's group leaders, and also broadcast the key elements to a broader audience through a 52-episode radio program.

We are making sure that a maximum of UNDEF programming not only strengthens civil society, but is administered in large part by civil society organizations. No more than 20 percent of UNDEF projects will be administered by UN agencies.

UN Reform

I've argued that the UN is in some cases the best forum for addressing many of the world's thorny transnational problems. Recognizing the important role the UN has to play, the United States remains the largest financial contributor to the UN, in terms of both assessed and voluntary contributions.

Like other contributors, we favor effective, results-based management because money wasted means less funding for effective programs that can tangibly improve lives. We want each program to deliver the maximum services possible to the countries that need them the most.

Critics of the U.S. drive for UN reform suggest that our calls -- joined by our developed nation partners -- for increased efficiency are thinly veiled attempts to reduce our contributions to the UN. This is not the case; the U.S. will continue to generously support the UN. We simply want to see effective, responsible stewardship of the funds that we contribute - a sentiment that should resonate with every member state.

We do not seek belt-tightening as an end in itself. We seek a UN which delivers better rather than one which delivers less. We need developing countries to understand that sincere aim.

We've also encountered some opposition to our drive for reform from member states that think our call for reform is a cover for exerting more U.S. control over UN agencies and organizations. To that end, we are working to communicate that UN reform -- and the increased efficiency and effectiveness it delivers -- will be to the benefit of all member states.

UN programs to advance peace, development, public health, and human rights are particularly important to developing countries. Arguably, developing countries have an even bigger stake in creating a more effective organization, accountable management, prioritized targeting of resources, and reallocation of resources from programs that do not work, are redundant, or obsolete, to programs that do work, than the developed nations that are the UN's largest financial contributors. In this subtle way, reform and renewal of the UN is not about accounting, but about better protecting human dignity.

The new UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, has said that UN reform will be a priority. The U.S. certainly welcomes that focus. Rather than harassment of a bloodthirsty autocracy, Ban's insistence that the UN Development Program's work in North Korea be audited is an example of making sure that the innocent are best helped.

Conclusion

To return to the quote I opened with -- indifference to the suffering of others, or to constant assaults on their human dignity, is unacceptable.

President Bush and Secretary Rice feel this deeply, and are committed to protecting and advancing human dignity around the world -- in the refugee camps of Darfur, in the towns of Eastern Europe where desperate young women fall into the hands of traffickers, in Sub-Saharan Africa where the men and women who should be the productive engines of their societies lie dying of AIDS, and wherever repressive regimes rob people of their humanity by taking away their full voice in political processes.

As President Bush said at the United Nations in 2004, "Both the American Declaration of Independence and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaim the equal value and dignity of every human life. That dignity is honored by the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, protection of private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance. That dignity is dishonored by oppression, corruption, tyranny, bigotry, terrorism and all violence against the innocent. And both of our founding documents affirm that this bright line between justice and injustice -- between right and wrong -- is the same in every age, and every culture, and every nation." In so saying, President Bush was suggesting that human dignity is universal. It demands transnational solutions for transnational problems.

The United States knows that the United Nations has a role to play in this struggle, and we value our partnership with the UN's members and entities in protecting and advancing human dignity wherever it is under threat. We know that all people long for human dignity, and all people deserve it. Not because the U.S. says so, but because it is the universal law of nature that the UN was designed in the first place to serve.