The report puts forward a new vision of collective security, one that addresses all of the major threats to international peace and security felt around the world. Our research and consultations revealed that ours is an age of unparalleled interconnection among threats to international peace and security, and mutual vulnerability between weak and strong. We found that the United Nations has been much more effective in addressing the major threats to peace and security than it is given credit for, but that nonetheless major changes are needed if the United Nations is to be effective, efficient and equitable in providing collective security for all in the twenty-first century.

Our mandate from you precluded any in-depth examination of individual conflicts and we have respected that guidance. But the members of the Panel believe it would be remiss of them if they failed to point out that no amount of systemic changes to the way the United Nations handles both old and new threats to peace and security will enable it to discharge effectively its role under the Charter if efforts are not redoubled to resolve a number of long-standing disputes which continue to fester and to feed the new threats we now face. Foremost among these are the issues of Palestine, Kashmir and the Korean Peninsula.

The members of the Panel may not be in full agreement with every specific point and detail of the report, but they all endorse the report and generally agree with its findings. I undertake to draw to your attention, however, that the members of the Panel disagree about the models put forth for Security Council expansion and the method for determining criteria for Security Council membership. Some members of the Panel believe strongly that only the model involving expansion of permanent membership, albeit without a veto, will equip the Security Council to deal with the new century’s threats. Others believe equally strongly that the alternative model involving elected, long-term but non-permanent members is the better way to proceed. We all agree, however, that it would be a major error to allow the discussions needed to move towards a decision between the two options to divert attention from decisions on the many other necessary proposals for change, the validity and viability of which do not depend on Security Council enlargement.

Our report is addressed to you, but many of our recommendations will require commitment from and action by heads of Government. Only through their leadership can we realistically forge the new consensus required to meet the threats described in our report.

Our deliberations drew on inputs from a wide range of sources, including Governments, academic experts and civil society organizations across the globe. None of our work would have been possible were it not for the extensive support we received. The following Governments made generous financial contributions to our work: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Mauritius, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russian Federation, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey and United Kingdom. The following foundations and think tanks made financial or in-kind contributions to our work: Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, New York University Center on International Cooperation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation, Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanley Foundation, United Nations Foundation and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

I should like to conclude by thanking you most warmly on my own behalf and that of other members of the Panel for the honour of entrusting to us this important task. I also wish to register our gratitude to all those who have contributed over the past year to our process of reflection, and above all to our Research Director, Stephen Stedman, and the Secretary of the Panel, Loraine Rickard-Martin, and their staff, without whose hard work and intellectual contributions the present report would not have seen the light of day.

1. The United Nations was created in a spirit of optimism fuelled by the end of the Second World War and the will to avoid a repeat of its horrors and those of its predecessor. For many of the States most traumatized by two world wars, the experiment has been successful. Over the subsequent 60 years, many parts of the world have enjoyed unparalleled peace and prosperity. The dynamics and tensions that led to the Second World War were laid to rest, war between the great Powers was avoided and a stable peace emerged in Europe. Japan, Germany and Italy were successfully integrated into the family of nations and are currently the second, third and sixth largest financial contributors to the United Nations.

2. In the first 30 years of the United Nations, dozens of new States emerged from colonial systems that, until recent times, tied half of mankind to a handful of capitals. Assisting new States into being was a seminal contribution of the United Nations during this period. Decolonization in turn transformed the United Nations. At the creation of the United Nations in 1945, there were 51 members; today there are 191. The General Assembly was transformed from a body composed of States that largely resembled one another to one whose membership varied dramatically. By the mid-1960s, developing countries formed a majority in the General Assembly and through it gained a voice in international politics largely denied to them outside the institution.

3. The second half of the twentieth century was a struggle for the viability of these new States and the well-being of their citizens. They inherited arbitrary colonial boundaries and colonial economies designed to serve the needs of the metropole. Independence was the start of a race to educate and develop the professional, scientific and technological expertise to run modern States and economies. All of this took place in an era of huge expectations about what States could and should deliver, when most models of economic growth relied on heavy State control.

4. In the last 40 years, life expectancy in developing countries has increased by 20 years, and per capita income has doubled in such countries as Botswana, Brazil, China, the Republic of Korea and Turkey in less than a third of the time it took to do so in the United Kingdom or the United States a century or more earlier. Despite such progress, however, large parts of the world remained mired in life-threatening poverty. Between 1975 and 1999, sub-Saharan Africa saw no overall increase in its per capita income.

5. By the 1980s, many of these new States faced crises of State capacity and legitimacy, reflected in the rise of internal wars as the dominant form of warfare in the second half of the twentieth century (see figure I).

6. As we enter the twenty-first century, these struggles are far from over. More than a billion people lack access to clean water, more than two billion have no access to adequate sanitation and more than three million die every year from water-related diseases. Fourteen million people, including six million children, die every year from hunger. There were 842 million undernourished people in 2000; 95 per cent lived in poor countries.

7. Almost 30 million people in Africa now have HIV/AIDS. In the worst-affected States, middle-aged urban elites are heavily afflicted, eroding State capacity and decimating the economic activity of what should be a State’s most productive group. The increasing number of infected women and girls is threatening food and agricultural production. If trends are not reversed, some of these States face collapse under the combined weight of poverty and HIV/AIDS.

8. Decolonization was only one of the forces that shaped the United Nations. The United Nations founders did not anticipate that the United States and the former Soviet Union would soon embark on a global rivalry, developing and deploying tens of thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the world many times over.

9. Controlling the destructive capability of nuclear technology and harnessing its promise became central to the work of the United Nations. The very first resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1946 called for the disarmament of "weapons adaptable to mass destruction".

10. The cold war shaped much of global politics for the next 45 years. The rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union blocked the Security Council from playing a dominant role in maintaining international peace and security. Nearly all armed conflicts and struggles for liberation were viewed through the prism of East-West rivalry until the historic collapse of the former Soviet Union and the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe.

11. Nonetheless, without the United Nations the post-1945 world would very probably have been a bloodier place. There were fewer inter-State wars in the last half of the twentieth century than in the first half. Given that during the same period the number of States grew almost fourfold, one might have expected to see a marked rise in inter-State wars. Yet that did not occur and the United Nations contributed to that result. The United Nations diminished the threat of inter-State war in several ways. Peace was furthered by the invention of peacekeeping; diplomacy was carried out by the Secretary-General; disputes were remedied under the International Court of Justice; and a strong norm was upheld against aggressive war.

12. The dramatic but peaceful end of the cold war opened an opportunity for collective security to flourish. The first years after the end of the cold war seemed to point towards a new role for the United Nations. In 1990, the Security Council authorized the use of force against Iraq to liberate Kuwait. The Security Council broadened the interpretation of threats to international peace and security to authorize an intervention for humanitarian purposes in Somalia. The United Nations helped bring to an end several protracted wars in Central America and Southern Africa.

13. The moment was short-lived. It quickly became apparent that the United Nations had exchanged the shackles of the cold war for the straitjacket of Member State complacency and great Power indifference. Although the United Nations gave birth to the notion of human security, it proved poorly equipped to provide it. Long-standing regional conflicts, such as those involving Israel/Palestine and Kashmir, remained unresolved. Failures to act in the face of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia eroded international support. Optimism yielded to renewed cynicism about the willingness of Member States to support the Organization.

14. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on New York and Washington, D.C., brought with them a glimpse of the potential for renewed collective security. On 12 September 2001, France introduced and the Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1368 (2001), which condemned the attacks and opened the way for United States-led military action against the Taliban regime in self-defence. On the same day, the General Assembly condemned terrorism and the attacks. On 28 September 2001, the Security Council adopted resolution 1373 (2001), which obligates all Member States, under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, to take specific actions to combat terrorism. Three months later, the United Nations presided over the Bonn Agreement, which created an interim government to replace the deposed Taliban regime. The United Nations stood behind the interim government in Afghanistan as custodian of the peace process and helped to draft the country’s new constitution.

15. This spirit of international purpose lasted only months and was eroded by divisions over the United States-led war in Iraq in 2003.

16. The attacks of 11 September 2001 revealed that States, as well as collective security institutions, have failed to keep pace with changes in the nature of threats. The technological revolution that has radically changed the worlds of communication, information-processing, health and transportation has eroded borders, altered migration and allowed individuals the world over to share information at a speed inconceivable two decades ago. Such changes have brought many benefits but also great potential for harm. Smaller and smaller numbers of people are able to inflict greater and greater amounts of damage, without the support of any State. A new threat, transnational organized crime, undermines the rule of law within and across borders. Technologies designed to improve daily life can be transformed into instruments of aggression. We have yet to fully understand the impact of these changes, but they herald a fundamentally different security climate — one whose unique opportunities for cooperation are matched by an unprecedented scope for destruction.

17. Today, more than ever before, threats are interrelated and a threat to one is a threat to all. The mutual vulnerability of weak and strong has never been clearer.

18. Global economic integration means that a major terrorist attack anywhere in the developed world would have devastating consequences for the well-being of millions of people in the developing world. The World Bank estimates that the attacks of 11 September 2001 alone increased the number of people living in poverty by 10 million; the total cost to the world economy probably exceeded 80 billion dollars. These numbers would be far surpassed by an incident involving nuclear terrorism.

19. Similarly, the security of the most affluent State can be held hostage to the ability of the poorest State to contain an emerging disease. Because international flight times are shorter than the incubation periods for many infectious diseases, any one of 700 million international airline passengers every year can be an unwitting global disease-carrier. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) spread to more than 8,000 people in 30 countries in three months, killing almost 700. The influenza pandemic of 1919 killed as many as 100 million people, far more than the First World War, over a period of a little more than a year. Today, a similar virus could kill tens of millions in a fraction of the time.

20. Every threat to international security today enlarges the risk of other threats. Nuclear proliferation by States increases the availability of the materiel and technology necessary for a terrorist to acquire a nuclear weapon. The ability of non-State actors to traffic in nuclear materiel and technology is aided by ineffective State control of borders and transit through weak States.

21. International terrorist groups prey on weak States for sanctuary. Their recruitment is aided by grievances nurtured by poverty, foreign occupation and the absence of human rights and democracy; by religious and other intolerance; and by civil violence — a witch’s brew common to those areas where civil war and regional conflict intersect. In recent years, terrorists have helped to finance their activities and moved large sums of money by gaining access to such valuable commodities as drugs in countries beset by civil war.

22. Poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation and war feed one another in a deadly cycle. Poverty (as measured by per capita gross domestic product (GDP)) is strongly associated with the outbreak of civil war (see figure II). Such diseases as malaria and HIV/AIDS continue to cause large numbers of deaths and reinforce poverty. Disease and poverty, in turn, are connected to environmental degradation; climate change exacerbates the occurrence of such infectious disease as malaria and dengue fever. Environmental stress, caused by large populations and shortages of land and other natural resources, can contribute to civil violence.

23. Transnational organized crime facilitates many of the most serious threats to international peace and security. Corruption, illicit trade and money-laundering contribute to State weakness, impede economic growth and undermine democracy. These activities thus create a permissive environment for civil conflict. The prospect of organized criminal groups providing nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons to terrorists is particularly worrying. Increasing drug trade partly accounts for rapidly increasing levels of HIV/AIDS infections, especially in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. And organized criminal activities undermine peacebuilding efforts and fuel many civil wars through illicit trade in conflict commodities and small arms.

24. No State, no matter how powerful, can by its own efforts alone make itself invulnerable to today’s threats. Every State requires the cooperation of other States to make itself secure. It is in every State’s interest, accordingly, to cooperate with other States to address their most pressing threats, because doing so will maximize the chances of reciprocal cooperation to address its own threat priorities.

25. Take, as one example, the threat of nuclear terrorism. Experts estimate that terrorists with 50 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU), an amount that would fit into six one-litre milk cartons, need only smuggle it across borders in order to create an improvised nuclear device that could level a medium-sized city. Border controls will not provide adequate defence against this threat. To overcome the threat of nuclear terrorism requires the cooperation of States, strong and weak, to clean up stockpiles of HEU, better protect shipping containers at ports and agree on new rules regulating the enrichment of uranium. Cooperation in the sharing of intelligence by States is essential for stopping terrorism.

26. Similarly, in order to stop organized crime States must cooperate to fight money-laundering, trafficking in drugs and persons, and corruption. International efforts to stem the problem are only as strong as the weakest link. Ineffective collective security institutions diminish the security of every region and State.

27. The most robust defence against the possible terrorist use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons would seek to control dangerous materials, deter and capture terrorists, and address the broader threats that increase the risk of terrorist action. Civil war, disease and poverty increase the likelihood of State collapse and facilitate the spread of organized crime, thus also increasing the risk of terrorism and proliferation due to weak States and weak collective capacity to exercise the rule of law. Preventing mass-casualty terrorism requires a deep engagement to strengthen collective security systems, ameliorate poverty, combat extremism, end the grievances that flow from war, tackle the spread of infectious disease and fight organized crime.

28. Thus all States have an interest in forging a new comprehensive collective security system that will commit all of them to act cooperatively in the face of a broad array of threats.

29. In signing the Charter of the United Nations, States not only benefit from the privileges of sovereignty but also accept its responsibilities. Whatever perceptions may have prevailed when the Westphalian system first gave rise to the notion of State sovereignty, today it clearly carries with it the obligation of a State to protect the welfare of its own peoples and meet its obligations to the wider international community. But history teaches us all too clearly that it cannot be assumed that every State will always be able, or willing, to meet its responsibilities to protect its own people and avoid harming its neighbours. And in those circumstances, the principles of collective security mean that some portion of those responsibilities should be taken up by the international community, acting in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to help build the necessary capacity or supply the necessary protection, as the case may be.

30. What we seek to protect reflects what we value. The Charter of the United Nations seeks to protect all States, not because they are intrinsically good but because they are necessary to achieve the dignity, justice, worth and safety of their citizens. These are the values that should be at the heart of any collective security system for the twenty-first century, but too often States have failed to respect and promote them. The collective security we seek to build today asserts a shared responsibility on the part of all States and international institutions, and those who lead them, to do just that.

31. To be credible and sustainable a collective security system must be effective, efficient and equitable. In all these respects, the multilateral system as we now know it, in responding to the major security threats which the world has confronted in recent decades, has shown that it can perform. But it must be strengthened to perform better — in all the ways we spell out in the present report.

32. Whether by reducing the demand for nuclear weapons, mediating inter-State conflict or ending civil wars, collective security institutions have made critical contributions to the maintenance of international peace and security, although those contributions are often denigrated, both by those who would have the institutions do more and by those who would have them do less.

33. Collective security institutions are rarely effective in isolation. Multilateral institutions normally operate alongside national, regional and sometimes civil society actors, and are most effective when these efforts are aligned to common goals. This is as true of mediation as it is of post-conflict reconstruction, poverty-reduction strategies and non-proliferation measures.

34. States are still the front-line responders to today’s threats. Successful international actions to battle poverty, fight infectious disease, stop transnational crime, rebuild after civil war, reduce terrorism and halt the spread of dangerous materials all require capable, responsible States as partners. It follows that greater effort must be made to enhance the capacity of States to exercise their sovereignty responsibly. For all those in a position to help others build that capacity, it should be part of their responsibility to do so.

35. Collective action often fails, sometimes dramatically so. Collective instruments are often hampered by a lack of compliance, erratic monitoring and verification, and weak enforcement. Early warning is only effective when it leads to early action for prevention. Monitoring and verification work best when they are treated as complements to, not substitutes for, enforcement.

36. Collective security institutions have proved particularly poor at meeting the challenge posed by large-scale, gross human rights abuses and genocide. This is a normative challenge to the United Nations: the concept of State and international responsibility to protect civilians from the effects of war and human rights abuses has yet to truly overcome the tension between the competing claims of sovereign inviolability and the right to intervene. It is also an operational challenge: the challenge of stopping a Government from killing its own civilians requires considerable military deployment capacity.

37. Some collective security instruments have been efficient. As the institutional embodiment of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and of considerable long-term success in preventing widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) — with its regular budget of less than $275 million — stands out as an extraordinary bargain. Similarly, the Secretary-General’s mediation efforts, though grossly underresourced, have helped reduce international tensions.

38. But more collective security instruments have been inefficient. Post-conflict operations, for example, have too often been characterized by countless ill-coordinated and overlapping bilateral and United Nations programmes, with inter-agency competition preventing the best use of scarce resources.

39. The biggest source of inefficiency in our collective security institutions has simply been an unwillingness to get serious about preventing deadly violence. The failure to invest time and resources early in order to prevent the outbreak and escalation of conflicts leads to much larger and deadlier conflagrations that are much costlier to handle later.

40. The credibility of any system of collective security also depends on how well it promotes security for all its members, without regard to the nature of would-be beneficiaries, their location, resources or relationship to great Powers.

41. Too often, the United Nations and its Member States have discriminated in responding to threats to international security. Contrast the swiftness with which the United Nations responded to the attacks on 11 September 2001 with its actions when confronted with a far more deadly event: from April to mid-July 1994, Rwanda experienced the equivalent of three 11 September 2001 attacks every day for 100 days, all in a country whose population was one thirty-sixth that of the United States. Two weeks into the genocide, the Security Council withdrew most of its peacekeepers from the country. It took almost a month for United Nations officials to call it a genocide and even longer for some Security Council members. When a new mission was finally authorized for Rwanda, six weeks into the genocide, few States offered soldiers. The mission deployed as the genocide ended.

42. Similarly, throughout the deliberation of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, we have been struck once again by the glacial speed at which our institutions have responded to massive human rights violations in Darfur, Sudan.

43. When the institutions of collective security respond in an ineffective and inequitable manner, they reveal a much deeper truth about which threats matter. Our institutions of collective security must not just assert that a threat to one is truly a threat to all, but perform accordingly.

44. Since 1990, while developing countries’ per capita income has increased an average of 3 per cent annually, the number of people living in extreme poverty has increased in some regions by more than 100 million people. In at least 54 countries, average per capita income has declined over the same period. Every year, almost 11 million children die from preventable diseases and more than half a million women die during pregnancy or childbirth. Increasing poverty is accompanied by an increase in global inequality and income inequality in many poor countries. In parts of Latin America, for example, the income of the wealthiest fifth of households is 30 times greater than that of the poorest fifth. Worldwide, women and youth are disproportionately poor.

45. When poverty is added to ethnic or regional inequalities, the grievances that stoke civil violence are compounded. While it may not reach the level of war, the combination of a surging youth population, poverty, urbanization and unemployment has resulted in increased gang violence in many cities of the developing world. As one woman poignantly asked during the Panel’s consultation with civil society organizations in Africa, "How have we let what should be our greatest asset, youth, become a threat to our security?"

46. The continent hardest hit by poverty is Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, average life expectancy has declined from 50 to 46 since 1990. Whereas in the developed world less than one in 100 children die before age five, in most of sub-Saharan Africa that number is one in 10, and in 14 countries it is one in five. In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has increased since 1990. While undernourishment decreased worldwide in the 1990s, it increased in Africa.

47. Over the past three decades, the world has seen the emergence of new infectious diseases, a resurgence of older diseases and a spread of resistance to a growing number of mainstay antibiotic drugs. Recent outbreaks of polio threaten to undermine its near eradication, which was one of the great accomplishments of the twentieth century. These trends signify a dramatic decay in local and global public health capacity.

48. International response to HIV/AIDS was shockingly slow and remains shamefully ill-resourced. The first major international initiative on HIV/AIDS, the Global Programme on AIDS, came only in 1987, six years after the first cases of HIV were identified and after it had infected millions of people worldwide. Nine years and 25 million infections later, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) was created to coordinate United Nations agencies working on HIV/AIDS. By 2000, when the Security Council first discussed HIV/AIDS as a threat to international peace and security, the number of deaths per year from HIV/AIDS in Africa had outstripped the number of battle deaths in all the civil wars fought in the 1990s. By 2003, when the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was created, there were more than 11 million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Africa.

49. That Africa has borne the brunt of the HIV/AIDS pandemic raises the troubling question of whether international response would have been so slow if the disease had reduced life expectancy by 30 years in non-African countries.

50. Progress in stemming other lethal infectious diseases remains elusive. The global drive to control tuberculosis has shown significant advances, including improvements in political commitment, financing, strategy formulation, access to medication and medical research. Yet more than 8.5 million new cases of tuberculosis emerge and more than two million people die of tuberculosis every year. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that, if current trends continue, between now and 2020 nearly one billion people will be newly infected, 150 million will develop the disease and 36 million will die. Further improvements in the affordability and accessibility of medicines — not just for tuberculosis — are still sorely needed.

51. The recent international experience in combating SARS shows how the spread of infectious disease can be limited when effective global institutions work in close partnership with capable national institutions. Rapid response by WHO and national agencies contained the spread of the disease and prevented a far more serious outbreak that could have threatened thousands of lives on several continents. No State could have achieved this degree of containment of the disease in isolation.

52. Current trends indicate persistent and possibly worsening food insecurity in many countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Population growth in the developing world and increased per capita consumption in the industrialized world have led to greater demand for scarce resources. The loss of arable land, water scarcity, overfishing, deforestation and the alteration of ecosystems pose daunting challenges for sustainable development. The world’s population is expected to increase from 6.3 billion today to 8.9 billion in 2050, with nearly all of that growth occurring in the countries least equipped to absorb it. Feeding such a rapidly growing population will only be possible if agricultural yields can be increased significantly and sustainably.

53. Environmental degradation has enhanced the destructive potential of natural disasters and in some cases hastened their occurrence. The dramatic increase in major disasters witnessed in the last 50 years provides worrying evidence of this trend. More than two billion people were affected by such disasters in the last decade, and in the same period the economic toll surpassed that of the previous four decades combined. If climate change produces more acute flooding, heat waves, droughts and storms, this pace may accelerate.

54. Rarely are environmental concerns factored into security, development or humanitarian strategies. Nor is there coherence in environmental protection efforts at the global level. Most attempts to create governance structures to tackle the problems of global environmental degradation have not effectively addressed climate change, deforestation and desertification. Regional and global multilateral treaties on the environment are undermined by inadequate implementation and enforcement by the Member States.

55. International institutions and States have not organized themselves to address the problems of development in a coherent, integrated way, and instead continue to treat poverty, infectious disease and environmental degradation as stand-alone threats. The fragmented sectoral approaches of international institutions mirror the fragmented sectoral approaches of Governments: for example, finance ministries tend to work only with the international financial institutions, development ministers only with development programmes, ministers of agriculture only with food programmes and environment ministers only with environmental agencies. Bilateral donors correctly call for better United Nations coordination but show little enthusiasm for similar efforts on their own account.

56. Existing global economic and social governance structures are woefully inadequate for the challenges ahead. To tackle the challenges of sustainable development countries must negotiate across different sectors and issues, including foreign aid, technology, trade, financial stability and development policy. Such packages are difficult to negotiate and require high-level attention and leadership from those countries that have the largest economic impacts. At the moment, there is no high-level forum which provides leaders from large industrial and developing economies a regular opportunity for frank dialogue, deliberation and problem-solving.

57. The United Nations comparative advantage in addressing economic and social threats is its unparalleled convening power, which allows it to formulate common development targets and rally the international community around a consensus for achieving them. In recent years, the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, have led to global understanding and ambitious programmes for alleviating poverty, providing food security, growing economies and protecting the environment in ways that benefit future generations. The United Nations Millennium Declaration contains an ambitious but feasible set of agreed targets and benchmarks, later consolidated into the Millennium Development Goals, ranging from halving extreme poverty and protecting the environment to achieving greater gender equality and halting and reversing the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.

58. In 2002, world leaders agreed at Monterrey that aid donors and aid recipients both have obligations to achieve development. The primary responsibility for economic and social development lies with Governments, which must create a conducive environment for vigorous private-sector-led growth and aid effectiveness by pursuing sound economic policies, building effective and responsible institutions and investing in public and social services that will reach all of their people. In return for substantive improvements in the policies and institutions of developing countries, donor nations agreed to renew their efforts to reduce poverty, including by reducing trade barriers, increasing development assistance and providing debt relief for highly indebted poor countries.

59. With the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000, the international community committed itself to dramatically reduce poverty by 2015. Assessments by the Millennium Project indicate that, while some regions of the world are on track to reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day, other regions have regressed. In the area of reducing child mortality and increasing primary education enrolment, the world continues to lag behind its commitments. Little has been done to address the gender aspects of the Millennium Development Goals. Although poor and rich countries have pledged to take action to address social and economic threats, pledges have not materialized into resources and action and long-term commitments are scant. All States must recommit themselves to the goals of eradicating poverty, achieving sustained economic growth and promoting sustainable development.

60. We believe that the Millennium Development Goals should be placed at the centre of national and international poverty-reduction strategies. The dramatic shortfall in resources required to meet the Millennium Development Goals must be redressed, and the commitments to sound policies and good governance at all levels must be fulfilled. For the least developed countries, official development assistance (ODA) will be crucial and should be structured to support countries’ Millennium Development Goal-based poverty reduction strategies. The many donor countries which currently fall short of the United Nations 0.7 per cent gross national product (GNP) target for ODA should establish a timetable for reaching it.

61. After years of debate on whether to develop innovative approaches to financing for development, such as the International Financial Facility, donors have shifted to discussions of how to do so. We welcome this and encourage donors to move quickly to decisions on this issue.

62. In Monterrey and Johannesburg, leaders agreed that poverty alleviation is undermined by continuing inequities in the global trading system. Seventy per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and earn their income from agriculture. They pay a devastating cost when developed countries impose trade barriers on agricultural imports and subsidize agricultural exports. In 2001, the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Declaration explicitly committed signatories to put the needs and interests of developing countries at the heart of negotiations over a new trade round. WTO members should strive to conclude the Doha development round at the latest in 2006.

63. Governance reforms and improvements in trading opportunities will not by themselves bring about meaningful poverty alleviation in a significant number of the least developed countries — many of them in sub-Saharan Africa — where development efforts are undermined by poor infrastructure, low productivity agriculture, endemic disease and crippling levels of external debt. Developed countries will also have to do more to address the challenge in the poorest countries of debt sustainability — which should be redefined as the level of debt consistent with achieving the Millennium Development Goals. Lender Governments and the international financial institutions should provide highly indebted poor countries with greater debt relief, longer rescheduling and improved access to global markets.

64. Despite major international initiatives, the spread of HIV/AIDS is still rampant. In the most affected countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the impact of the pandemic is becoming more acute. In Asia, the number of infections exceeds seven million and is increasing rapidly. Although international resources devoted to meeting the challenge of HIV/AIDS have increased from about $250 million in 1996 to about $2.8 billion in 2002, more than $10 billion annually is needed to stem the pandemic.

65. The experience of some countries shows that properly funded and institutionalized efforts can yield remarkable successes in the fight against HIV/AIDS. By contrast, where Governments have refused to acknowledge the gravity of the threat and failed to address the problem, countries have experienced a dramatic turn for the worse and international efforts to address the problem have been hampered. Leaders of affected countries need to mobilize resources, commit funds and engage civil society and the private sector in disease-control efforts.

66. Despite all we know about the human toll of HIV/AIDS — the numbers of infections, the deaths, the children who are orphaned — we are left to guess what the long-term effect of the pandemic will be on the States most afflicted by the disease. While HIV/AIDS depletes the capacity of States and economies in Africa faster than it can be replenished, we do not know the cumulative effects of loss of government officials, skilled health professionals, teachers, service providers, caregivers, police, soldiers and peacekeepers. In the absence of good research into these questions, we cannot begin to develop a strategy for countering the long-term effects of HIV/AIDS on governance and State stability.

67. The Security Council, working closely with UNAIDS, should host a second special session on HIV/AIDS as a threat to international peace and security, to explore the future effects of HIV/AIDS on States and societies, generate research on the problem and identify critical steps towards a long-term strategy for diminishing the threat.

68. The fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria depends on capable, responsible States with functioning public health systems. The absence of health facilities is the primary factor spurring the proliferation of malaria. Funding gaps are preventing health-sector reforms in many heavily burdened countries, particularly those in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Inconsistent or partial treatment, resulting from insufficient funding, has allowed new strains of tuberculosis to develop that are far more difficult to treat. Even when programme funding for HIV/AIDS is available, inadequate or non-existent health facilities in the poorest areas of sub-Saharan Africa hinder programmes from being effectively or sustainably implemented. International donors, in partnership with national authorities and local civil society organizations, should undertake a major new global initiative to rebuild local and national public health systems throughout the developing world.

69. Such efforts should be undertaken simultaneously with improving global disease monitoring capabilities. This is triply imperative — as a means of fighting new emerging infectious disease, defending against the threat of biological terrorism and building effective, responsible States. Members of the World Health Assembly should provide greater resources to the WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network to increase its capacity to cope with potential disease outbreaks.

70. In extreme cases of threat posed by a new emerging infectious disease or intentional release of an infectious agent, there may be a need for cooperation between WHO and the Security Council in establishing effective quarantine measures (see sect. V below).

71. In order to address problems of climate change modern economies need to reduce their dependence on hydrocarbons and should undertake a special effort to devise climate-friendly development strategies. Member States should place special attention on the development of low-carbon energy sources, including natural gas, renewable power and nuclear power, and should place special emphasis on the development of low-greenhouse-gas technologies. The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has encouraged the development of renewable energy sources that could gradually correct today’s excessive dependency on fossil fuels. To further encourage this, States should provide incentives for the further development of renewable energy sources and begin to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies, especially for fossil fuel use and development.

72. The entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol after ratification by the Russian Federation is a positive development, even though the Protocol by itself is not sufficient to solve the challenge of limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The Protocol has encouraged the development of renewable energy sources that could gradually correct today’s excessive dependency on fossil fuels. Yet problems remain. Some advanced industrialized nations are on track to meet their Kyoto targets for reasons outside the realm of climate policy, e.g., a sharp reduction in their industrial production. The United States, which accounts for about one quarter of world emissions of greenhouse gases, refuses to ratify the Protocol. At the same time, developing countries, which now account for almost half of today’s net emissions of greenhouse gases (but only one tenth of per capita emissions), have been opposed to accepting any binding emission caps, which they perceive to be impediments to economic growth. Industrialized nations are likely to be more resistant to accepting costly reductions without increased developing country participation. Most importantly, the Protocol does not contain any obligations beyond 2012. We urge Member States to reflect on the gap between the promise of the Kyoto Protocol and its performance, re-engage on the problem of global warming and begin new negotiations to produce a new long-term strategy for reducing global warming beyond the period covered by the Protocol.

73. The United Nations and the international financial institutions should also do more to assist those States most vulnerable to severe natural disasters, the effects of which can be destablizing — as they were in 2004 in Haiti. The World Meteorological Organization has estimated that investments in vulnerability reduction could drastically reduce the number of deaths associated with natural disasters. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the World Bank should work in a more integrated fashion — and in partnership with Governments and outside research institutions — to improve vulnerability assessments and work with the most affected Governments to strengthen their adaptive capacity.

74. Although the world has seen few inter-State wars over the past 60 years, the threat of inter-State war has not vanished. Unresolved regional disputes in South Asia, North-East Asia and the Middle East continue to threaten international peace and security. These disputes may unravel 40 years of efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and more than 75 years of efforts to banish the scourge of biological and chemical weapons. In turn, inter-State rivalry in some regions fuels and exacerbates internal wars, making them more difficult to bring to a close. Such rivalry, by promoting conventional weapons build-ups, diverts scarce resources that could be used to reduce poverty, improve health and increase education.

75. War and ongoing instability in Iraq and Palestine have fuelled extremism in parts of the Muslim world and the West. This issue is complex and multidimensional and defies any simplistic categorization. Nonetheless, one cannot ignore the ability of extremist groups to foster perceptions within the West and within the Muslim world of cultural and religious antagonism between them, the dangers of which, if left unchecked, are profound.

76. In the past, the United Nations helped to reduce the threat of inter-State conflicts through the Secretary-General’s "good offices", or quiet diplomacy aimed at defusing crises and providing hostile parties the opportunity to talk freely and test intentions. Successive Secretaries-General have played this role despite little capacity within the Organization to support it.

77. With the end of the cold war, the Security Council became increasingly active in addressing international threats. The average annual number of resolutions it passed increased from 15 to 60, or from one resolution a month to one a week. Before 1989, the Council applied sanctions twice; since then it has imposed sanctions 14 times and for an increasingly diverse range of stated purposes, including to reverse aggression, restore democratic Governments, protect human rights, end wars, combat terrorism and support peace agreements.

78. Several of these sanctions regimes were at least partially effective. In some cases, they helped to produce negotiated agreements. In others, they combined with military pressure to weaken and isolate rebel groups and States in flagrant violation of Security Council resolutions.

79. Sanctions failed when they were not effectively targeted and when the Security Council failed to enforce them. Weak enforcement results from the strategic interests of powerful States; a lack of clarity about the purpose of sanctions; "sanctions fatigue" brought about by concern over their humanitarian impact; insufficient support from the respective sanctions committees; and insufficient State capacity to implement sanctions.

80. As a result of growing concern over the humanitarian impact of comprehensive sanctions, the Security Council stopped imposing them after the cases of Iraq, former Yugoslavia and Haiti, and turned exclusively to the use of financial, diplomatic, arms, aviation, travel and commodity sanctions, targeting the belligerents and policy makers most directly responsible for reprehensible policies.

81. Increased activity does not necessarily produce increased results. Not all situations that justified Security Council attention received it and not all its resolutions were followed by effective enforcement action. Yet two trends of the 1990s indicate increasing effectiveness in regulating international conflict. First, with the Council increasingly active and willing to use its powers under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, the balance between unilateral use of force and collectively authorized force has shifted dramatically. Collectively authorized use of force may not be the rule today, but it is no longer an exception. Second, and perhaps the most striking indicator of the growing importance of the role of the United Nations in regulating international conflict, is the recent expectation that the Security Council should be the arbiter of the use of force.

82. Many people assumed it was quite natural that the United States should seek Security Council support for going to war against Iraq in 2003. Superpowers, however, have rarely sought Security Council approval for their actions. That all States should seek Security Council authorization to use force is not a time-honoured principle; if this were the case, our faith in it would be much stronger. Our analysis suggests quite the opposite — that what is at stake is a relatively new emerging norm, one that is precious but not yet deep-rooted.

83. The case of Iraq prompted much difference of opinion. Some contend that the Security Council was ineffective because it could not produce Iraqi compliance with its resolutions. Others argue Security Council irrelevance because the Council did not deter the United States and its coalition partners from waging war. Still others suggest that the refusal of the Security Council to bow to United States pressure to legitimate the war is proof of its relevance and indispensability: although the Security Council did not deter war, it provided a clear and principled standard with which to assess the decision to go to war. The flood of Foreign Ministers into the Security Council chambers during the debates, and widespread public attention, suggest that the United States decision to bring the question of force to the Security Council reaffirmed not just the relevance but the centrality of the Charter of the United Nations.

84. Since the end of the cold war, peacemaking, peacekeeping and post-conflict peacebuilding in civil wars have become the operational face of the United Nations in international peace and security.

85. The rapid growth of United Nations activity in civil wars coincides with a sharp decline in their numbers (see figure III). Since 1992, civil wars have declined steadily, and by 2003 had dropped by roughly 40 per cent to less than 30 wars. In the last 15 years, more civil wars were ended through negotiation than in the previous two centuries — in large part because the United Nations provided leadership, opportunities for negotiation, strategic coordination, and the resources needed for implementation. Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved, and regional and international stability were enhanced.

86. This unprecedented success, however, was also coupled with major failures. Mediation produced settlement in only about 25 per cent of civil wars and only some of those attracted the political and material resources necessary for successful implementation. As a result, many implementation efforts failed, sometimes with disastrous consequences. If two peace agreements, the 1991 Bicesse Agreement for Angola and the 1993 Arusha Accords for Rwanda, had been successfully implemented, deaths attributable to war in the 1990s would have been reduced by several million. If the Security Council had been seriously committed to consolidating peace in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, more lives could have been saved, the Taliban might never have come to power and Al Qaida could have been deprived of its most important sanctuary.

87. The biggest failures of the United Nations in civil violence have been in halting ethnic cleansing and genocide. In Rwanda, Secretariat officials failed to provide the Security Council with early warning of extremist plans to kill thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. When the genocide started, troop contributors withdrew peacekeepers, and the Security Council, bowing to United States pressure, failed to respond. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, United Nations peacekeeping and the protection of humanitarian aid became a substitute for political and military action to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide. In Kosovo, paralysis in the Security Council led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to bypass the United Nations. Only in one instance in the 1990s — in East Timor — did the Security Council, urged on by the Secretary-General, work together with national Governments and regional actors to apply concerted pressure swiftly to halt large-scale killing.

88. The large loss of life in such wars and outbreaks of mass violence obliges the international community to be more vigilant in preventing them. When prevention fails, there is urgent need to stop the killing and prevent any further return to war.

89. The role of the United Nations in preventing wars can be strengthened by giving more attention to developing international regimes and norms to govern some of the sources and accelerators of conflict. A very wide range of laws, norms, agreements and arrangements are relevant here, covering legal regimes and dispute resolution mechanisms, arms control and disarmament regimes, and dialogue and cooperation arrangements. Some examples are set out below.

90. In the area of legal mechanisms, there have been few more important recent developments than the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court. In cases of mounting conflict, early indication by the Security Council that it is carefully monitoring the conflict in question and that it is willing to use its powers under the Rome Statute might deter parties from committing crimes against humanity and violating the laws of war. The Security Council should stand ready to use the authority it has under the Rome Statute to refer cases to the International Criminal Court.

91. More legal mechanisms are necessary in the area of natural resources, fights over which have often been an obstacle to peace. Alarmed by the inflammatory role of natural resources in wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, civil society organizations and the Security Council have turned to the "naming and shaming" of, and the imposition of sanctions against, individuals and corporations involved in illicit trade, and States have made a particular attempt to restrict the sale of "conflict diamonds". Evidence from Sierra Leone and Angola suggests that such efforts contributed to ending those civil wars. A new challenge for the United Nations is to provide support to weak States — especially, but not limited to, those recovering from war — in the management of their natural resources to avoid future conflicts.

92. The United Nations should work with national authorities, international financial institutions, civil society organizations and the private sector to develop norms governing the management of natural resources for countries emerging from or at risk of conflict.

93. There should also be a focus on the development of rules, for example through the International Law Commission, for the use of transboundary resources, such as water, oil and gas.

94. The United Nations should seek to work closely with regional organizations that have taken the lead in building frameworks for prevention. The United Nations can benefit from sharing information and analysis with regional early-warning systems, but more importantly regional organizations have gone farther than the United Nations in setting normative standards that can guide preventive efforts. For example, the Organization of American States (OAS) and the African Union (AU) agree on the need to protect elected Governments from coups. The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has developed operational norms on minority rights. The United Nations should build on the experience of regional organizations in developing frameworks for minority rights and the protection of democratically elected Governments from unconstitutional overthrow.

95. In the area of arms control and disarmament regimes, much more needs to be done, not only in the context of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (see sect. V below) but in relation to the proliferation of small arms and light weapons. In the 1990s, small arms, light weapons and landmines were the primary weapons in most civil wars. While concerted action by civil society organizations and concerned Member States led to a ban on landmines, efforts to limit the widespread availability of small arms and light weapons have barely moved beyond rhetoric to action.

96. A comprehensive approach to the small arms problem emerged in the late 1990s and seeks to create international action to limit their production and spread. The key global instrument for this approach is the United Nations Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, a comprehensive set of recommendations aimed at preventing and eradicating the illicit manufacture, transfer and circulation of small arms and light weapons. The Programme of Action makes innovative use of regional bodies, such as the Nairobi Secretariat, which, inter alia, monitors the implementation of the Nairobi Protocol for the Prevention, Control and Reduction of Small Arms and Light Weapons in the Great Lakes Region and the Horn of Africa, to report, monitor and verify State compliance. It should be considered a start rather than an end-point for United Nations efforts. Member States should expedite and conclude negotiations on legally binding agreements on the marking and tracing, as well as the brokering and transfer, of small arms and light weapons.

97. The United Nations can also help to prevent inter-State conflict by increasing the transparency of Member States’ conventional weapons holdings and acquisitions. The United Nations Register of Conventional Arms, established in 1991, enhances military transparency by soliciting annual declarations of Member States on their sale and purchase of conventional weapons and existing weapons holdings, as well as their defence postures, policies and doctrines. However, the Register is marred by incomplete, untimely and inaccurate reporting. All Member States should report completely and accurately on all elements of the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms, and the Secretary-General should be asked to report annually to the General Assembly and Security Council on any inadequacies in the reporting.

98. Prevention requires early warning and analysis that is based on objective and impartial research. Although the United Nations has some early-warning and analysis capacity scattered among different agencies and departments, the Secretary-General has not been able to establish any properly-resourced unit able to integrate inputs from these offices into early-warning reports and strategy options for purposes of decision-making. The best option for creating a coherent capacity for developing strategic options is to strengthen the Office of the Secretary-General through the creation of a Deputy Secretary-General for Peace and Security (see sect. XIX below).

99. Although some field-based agencies participate in early-warning mechanisms and international non-governmental organizations have played a major role in recent years in providing timely information, analysis and advocacy, the Secretary-General’s access to local analysis of conflict is sharply limited. Greater interaction by United Nations political, peacekeeping and humanitarian departments with outside sources of early-warning information and of local knowledge of conflicts would enhance United Nations conflict management. Also, in the past few years, research institutions (in academia and in other international organizations) have begun to compile both the necessary data and sophisticated analysis of various causes and accelerators of different kinds of conflict. United Nations policy sections should engage more actively with local sources of knowledge and outside sources of research.

100. United Nations efforts to prevent outbreaks of internal violence have met with less success than its efforts to prevent inter-State wars, and they are often inhibited by the reluctance of Member States to see their domestic affairs internationalized. But more effort could and should be made in this area, particularly through the appointment of skilled, experienced and regionally knowledgeable envoys, mediators and special representatives, who can make as important a contribution to conflict prevention as they do to conflict resolution.

101. In making such appointments, the Secretary-General should place high-level competence above all other criteria and do more to nurture internal and external expertise in this respect. This would be made easier by the establishment of a facility for training and briefing new or potential special representatives and other United Nations mediators, and we so recommend.

102. Mediators and negotiators need adequate support. Although the demand for United Nations mediation has skyrocketed in the past 10 years, resources devoted to this function have remained minimal. The deliberate underresourcing of the Department of Political Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat by Member States is at odds with these same States’ professed desire for a strong United Nations. The Department of Political Affairs should be given additional resources and should be restructured to provide more consistent and professional mediation support.

103. While the details of such a restructuring should be left to the Secretary-General, it should take into account the need for the United Nations to have:

(a) A field-oriented, dedicated mediation support capacity, comprised of a small team of professionals with relevant direct experience and expertise, available to all United Nations mediators;

(b) Competence on thematic issues that recur in peace negotiations, such as the sequencing of implementation steps, the design of monitoring arrangements, the sequencing of transitional arrangements and the design of national reconciliation mechanisms;

(c) Greater interaction with national mediators, regional organizations and non-governmental organizations involved in conflict resolution;

(d) Greater consultation with and involvement in peace processes of important voices from civil society, especially those of women, who are often neglected during negotiations.

104. In cases of mounting tensions, the early deployment of peacekeepers can reassure parties seeking peaceful resolution to a conflict and deter would-be aggressors. It is notable that the only clear case of preventive deployment to date, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, was requested by the national authorities and was manifestly a success. We encourage national leaders and parties to conflict to make constructive use of the option of preventive deployment.

105. The Security Council should also note that in countries that have emerged from conflict, the deployment of small numbers of peacekeepers to train national armed forces can serve an important preventive function.

106. Good communication between mediators and peacekeeping planners can also help identify opportunities for preventive deployments. The now occasional practice of peacekeeping planners sitting in on mediation processes should be standardized.

107. Any use of nuclear weapons, by accident or design, risks human casualties and economic dislocation on a catastrophic scale. Stopping the proliferation of such weapons — and their potential use, by either State or non-State actors — must remain an urgent priority for collective security.

108. The threat posed by nuclear proliferation — the spread of nuclear weapons among States — arises in two ways. The first and most immediate concern is that some countries, under cover of their current Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons membership, will covertly and illegally develop full-scale weapons programmes, or that — acting within the letter but perhaps not the spirit of the Treaty — they will acquire all the materials and expertise needed for weapons programmes with the option of withdrawing from the Treaty at the point when they are ready to proceed with weaponization.

109. The second longer-term, concern is about the erosion and possible collapse of the whole Treaty regime. Almost 60 States currently operate or are constructing nuclear power or research reactors, and at least 40 possess the industrial and scientific infrastructure which would enable them, if they chose, to build nuclear weapons at relatively short notice if the legal and normative constraints of the Treaty regime no longer apply.

110. Both concerns are now very real: the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is not as effective a constraint as it was. In 1963, when only four States had nuclear arsenals, the United States Government predicted that the following decade would see the emergence of 15 to 25 nuclear-weapon States; others predicted the number would be as high as 50. As of 2004, only eight States are known to have nuclear arsenals. The strong non-proliferation regime — embodied in IAEA and the Treaty itself — helped dramatically to slow the predicted rate of proli