NEW YORK, Sept 11 (LSN.ca) - The United Nations Millennium Summit, the largest gathering of world leaders in history, concluded Friday and the final version of the Summit Declaration has been released. The Declaration, a statement agreed to by a vote of the vast majority of world leaders is regarded by the United Nations as having “sketched out clear directions for adapting the Organization to its role in the new century.”
(http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2000/20000908.ga9758.doc.html) “It lies in your power, and therefore is your responsibility, to reach the goals that you have defined”, declared UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. “Only you can determine whether the United Nations rises to the challenge. For my part, I hereby re-dedicate myself, as from today, to carrying out your mandate.”

For Annan to declare that the document is a production of the world leaders themselves is a farce since it was UN bureaucrats who drafted the statement which remained essentially unchanged.

UN expert Henry Lamb, of Sovereignty International and ECO told LifeSite that although some suggest that the conference did nothing significant, “the declaration has given the UN a mandate from the highest political authority on earth, to go forward with its vision of global governance as laid out in the declaration.” Lamb noted that “prior to this meeting that agenda was illicit on the part of the UN but now is approved.”

The global governance agenda leads to the loss of sovereignty of individual nations. The weakening of sovereignty is reflected in the document. Despite pressure by various nations to include respect for sovereignty, the document does not include the term but rather mentions the ambiguous newspeak phrase “We rededicate ourselves to support all efforts to uphold the sovereign equality of all States.”

The management of all living species according to “sustainable development” terms is retained in the document, but the language is tempered by the term “prudence”. “Prudence must be shown in the management of all living species and natural resources, in accordance with the precepts of sustainable development,” it says.

The majority vote in favour of the document is surprising since many of the leaders appeared to contradict their nations’ official policies on important items in the document. The most glaring example of this is in the case of US President Bill Clinton. While the US Congress is dead set against UN treaties such as the International Criminal Court, Kyoto and CEDAW, the U.S. is now officially a party to this declaration which says:

“We resolve:
To ensure the implementation, by States Parties, of treaties in areas such as arms control and disarmament, and of international humanitarian law and human rights law, and call upon all States to consider signing and ratifying the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. To make every effort to ensure the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, preferably by the tenth anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 2002, and to embark on the required reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. To combat all forms of violence against women and to implement the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.”

One alarming proposal brought forward by the representative from Libya, among others, was to increase the power of the General Assembly to supercede the power of even the Security Council. Such a radical proposal is reflected in the declaration as it states its resolve, “To reaffirm the central position of the General Assembly as the chief deliberative, policy-making and representative organ of the United Nations, and to enable it to play that role effectively.”

Anna Halpine, a pro-life lobbyist at the United Nations and executive director of the World Youth Alliance, told LifeSite that “it is increasingly clear that the United Nations is moving to become a Parliament of Nations with increasing legislative powers.” Ms. Halpine, recently a senior assistant to a European cabinet minister, noted that the UN would follow the path of the EU which has “wrested more power from EU states with each successive summit and treaty.”

Would such grandiose designs on removing power even from the Security Council even be countenanced? The declaration calls for states “To intensify our efforts to achieve a comprehensive reform of the Security Council in all its aspects.” An analysis of the Summit and its proposals by John R. Bolton, former US Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs under Bush, notes that with the Summit “Kofi Annan was staging nothing less than a quiet coup d’état against the authority of the five permanent members of the Security Council.” He also says that “perhaps even more surprising, the United States and Britain were full supporters of the coup, while Russia, France and China did not appear to take it seriously.”

The approved draft of the declaration concludes “the United Nations is the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development. We, therefore, pledge our unstinting support for these common objectives, and our determination to achieve them.”

Many UN bureaucrats and their “civil society” allies have for years been labouring on their private elitist agenda for the U.N. This agenda has as its goal to radically transform the role and authority of the UN to replace what is seen as an international disorder of far too independent-minded, over-populated and socially unprogressive sovereign nations. There is therefore a strong possibility that in voting for the summit document many of the national leaders did not realize how the document would be interpreted and implemented by others against their own nations’ interests.

See the full declaration at:
http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/a55L2.htm

See the article by Bolton at:
http://www.nationalpost.com/commentary/story.html?f=/stories/20000911/396258.html