Changes in Global Atomic Policy
The 2005 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Mohamed El Baradei in lieu of their work in preventing military use of nuclear energy and for their efforts towards the safest possible standards of the use of nuclear for peaceful purposes.
The United Nations (UN) is aware that the UN came to fore at the dawn of the nuclear age late into the 1940s. The environment and atomic policy of the UN as such was greatly shaped by this fact.
On July 7, 2017, many member states meeting in New York in a UN Conference signed into the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which represents the first legal instrument multilaterally binding member states for nuclear disarmament in the last 20 years. The vote consisted of 122 ayes in favour of the treaty and only 1 nay by the Netherlands against the treaty.
The treaty covers a wide range of nuclear weaponization activities including the developing, testing, production, manufacture, acquisition, possession and stockpiling of nuclear armaments as well as the issuing of threats to use nuclear armaments (UN News Centre, 2017). Although the UN’s previous Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968 included 191 signatories, many countries like North Korea continue to attempt to transcend limitations imposed by the NPT.
IAEA’s Engagement with the Environment and Atomic Policy of the UN
The IAEA and its relationship with the UN is critical in light of the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, which follows a general agreement entered into by the two bodies in 1957 such that the IAEA is to work in conformity with the policies of the UN. This greatly helps the IAEA in achieving its goal of worldwide nuclear disarmament by working in a partnership with organizations connected to the UN’s system.
This also helps the IAEA in encouraging the peaceful use of nuclear energy in accordance with the legal regime provided by the UN. In this the IAEA partners with various agencies within the UN including the United Nations Environment Programme. Some of these partnerships include partnerships with the World Health Organization (WHO) in cancer control and treatment, which is a major consequence of exposure to lethal radiation, and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in moving towards a green economy with cleaner nuclear production and disposal.
The IAEA’s involvement with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is critical, and both have a stated aim to co-operate on issues such as the UN’s environmental policy, nuclear waste management, nuclear resource efficiency and climate change. Both have a role in shaping the environment and atomic policy of the UN. The co-operation between the UNEP and the IAEA began in 1974, when both entered into a project based on the IAEA’s Laboratory for Marine Radioactivity Studies located in Monaco.
The IAEA and the UNEP entered into a Practical Arrangement in 2014 that looked to govern collaboration between the two bodies. The focus of the Practical Arrangement was to foster co-operation specifically in terms of climate change, management of ecosystems, efficient and sustainable use of resources, hazardous waste disposal and in influencing environmental policy.
In the collaboration framework provided in this Practical Arrangement, both bodies are to work together to support members to the UNEP and member states of the IAEA to provide support in developing scientific capabilities, meet environmental challenges, achieving resource sustainability and deal with the variability caused by climate change (IAEA, 2017).
The IAEA’s overall legal framework for safety requirements in the peaceful use of nuclear energy is met by the only legal policy to implement safety standards in managing radioactive wastes internationally – the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management.
The Joint Convention seeks to achieve nuclear safety through an international collaborative approach based on the sharing of expertise on radioactive wastes and spent fuel management. The Convention fixes international safety standards and measures to ensure nuclear safety based on agreements between stakeholders and it strives to achieve national arrangements in individual countries based on the standards agreed upon in the convention.
The Convention also includes clauses that facilitate individual countries with improper infrastructures to receive international assistance in case of a lack of resources. The Convention applies both to countries with nuclear power programmes and those using radiation sources for industrial and commercial purposes (IAEA, 2011). The UNEP thus forms part of the IAEA’s collaborative approach that aims to build consensus on issues of nuclear safety.
Under the NPT of 1968, the IAEA conducts on-site inspections of nuclear materials in countries to ensure nuclear safety. Other than this, the UN also has the legal document of the UN Conference on Disarmament, which was adopted in 1996 to promote nuclear disarmament. In addition the UN also has the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space for the curbing the use of nuclear armaments in outer space and the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Nuclear Radiation to report on safety standards on the effects of exposure to nuclear radiation worldwide. The UN also has the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material, 1980 to protect nuclear material from falling into the wrong hands (UN, 2017).
The UNEP does not consider nuclear power as a renewable source of energy, with its principal problem with nuclear power being the disposal of radioactive wastes. The UNEP fears environmental contamination by nuclear waste such as spent nuclear waste pools of water. Nuclear power and fuel also pose security threats, which can immensely increase contamination risks. The UNEP is also opposed to nuclear power plants being built near populated areas and the dependence of certain countries such as France and Japan on nuclear power.
The UNEP also feels that nuclear power plants are outside the reach of underdeveloped countries, imposing an unfair balance of trade for the poorer nations (UNEP, 2016). The UNEP stands for strict safety standards for nuclear power plants and views nuclear waste as a source for severe forms of contamination and pollution.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.