The UN is a country club

(Originally posted on The Mark)

My seven-year-old daughter recently asked me to explain the United Nations to her. The best analogy I could come up with was this: the UN is like a country club. This is a disturbingly accurate description: members-only access, archaic unwritten rules, subgroups in which membership is determined by buying power, and a male-dominated culture that has withstood decades of societal development in the outside world.

But on Jan. 1, 2011, some of this is set to change. On that day, the UN will formally put into operation its first standalone entity dedicated to promoting women’s rights and gender equality: UN Women. This new body combines the work of four old entities that each carried out some part of the UN’s work on women. UN Women will be headed by an under-secretary general, who by stature is part of the UN secretary general’s cabinet. Just as important, the proposed budget for UN Women’s field-based work on women’s rights and equality is at least 10 times as high as for the previous bodies combined.

The establishment of UN Women comes on the back of years of coordinated pressure from women’s groups across the world, as well as much work by ally member states, including Canada. During the negotiations in New York, Canada’s voice was often one of the few that combined a real desire to see this entity come about with in-depth knowledge about UN budgetary and decision-making procedures. For a country where diplomats have been prohibited by their government from even uttering the words “gender equality,” that’s not half bad.

So it’s no overstatement to say that Jan. 1, 2011 is a landmark date for women worldwide. However, earlier this month, the country-club aspect of the United Nations threatened to spoil the moment by applying unwritten rules to procedures that purport to be fair.

Here's how: UN Women is set to be governed by a board made up of an elected group of UN member states, just like other separate UN entities such as the United Nations Fund for Children and the United Nations Development Programme. As per tradition, each geographic region is allocated a set number of seats on the board. In theory, regional groups are supposed to submit a list of countries interested in serving on the board to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which then votes on membership. In reality, regional groups tend to slug out any competition between them in closed meetings, then submit only as many country candidates as there are seats, thus rendering any later voting a sham. These pre-selected lists are called “clean slates.”

This is precisely what happened with the election of the UN Women board. As a result, two weeks before the elections, it seemed clear that Iran and Saudi Arabia – irrespective of their disgraceful track records on women’s rights – were going to serve on the board of UN Women.

Concern within the Asia group led to the submission of additional board candidates to the Asia list, and subsequently to the defeat of Iran in the ECOSOC elections. Saudi Arabia, however, will still serve, as one of two nontraditional donor countries “pre-elected” to UN Women, since there were only two proposed candidates for two seats. Saudi Arabia – a country where adult women have to seek permission from male relatives to study or work – essentially bought a place on the board of an entity whose mandate is to end gender discrimination.

That said, while unwritten procedures and buying power may have affected what were supposed to be fair and open board elections, the new entity will surely gain legitimacy and respect through its work.

So when I tell my daughter that the United Nations is a country club, I also tell her this: once in a while, some part of the organization seems to live up to the ideals the organization was founded upon: the promotion of development, peace, and equality. And then it ceases to be a country club and emerges as the forum for coordinated dialogue and action that it should be.