Eleven proposals, three stages
A list of proposals says nothing about whether they can happen. Our prospective chronological timeline therefore orders ours by what they require of existing law: some build on institutions already in place, others run up against state interests, and the last ones require amending the Charter, which needs a two-thirds majority in the General Assembly and the agreement of the five permanent members of the Security Council.
| No. | Proposal | What it involves |
|---|---|---|
|
First stage
Achievable now, building on existing institutions without amending the Charter.
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| 1 | Give NGOs their full place | Raise the status of NGOs in UN bodies and make the NGO World Forums permanent, building on established practice from the NGO-UNESCO Liaison Committee to ECOSOC. |
| 2 | Financial transparency for INGOs | Introduce FATF-style financial transparency standards for international non-governmental organisations. |
| 3 | Support representative democracy | Allow the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which gathers parliamentarians from around the world in Geneva, to submit one legislative proposal a year to national parliaments. |
| 4 | Regulate digital technology and AI | International regulation of digital technology and artificial intelligence, including military uses, with human dignity at its core. |
| 5 | Human security and shared standards | Promote human security, as defined by UNDP in 1994, through binding social and environmental trade standards, drawing on ECOSOC, the ILO, the WTO and UNEP. |
|
Second stage
Legally possible, politically difficult.
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| 6 | Peacekeeping and diplomacy first | Make greater use of UN peacekeepers and favour diplomatic and judicial settlement of conflicts. |
| 7 | Arms embargoes | Favour arms embargoes against an aggressor state over economic sanctions that hit civilians first. |
| 8 | A world institution for the climate | Create a permanent world institution for the environment and the climate, modelled on the COPs but with binding powers. |
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Third stage
Our flagship proposals: they require a review of the Charter.
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| 9 | Secretary-General and General Assembly | Allow the Secretary-General to have the General Assembly adopt, by a two-thirds majority, a resolution overcoming a Security Council deadlock on Chapter VII matters. |
| 10 | A representative Security Council | Reform permanent membership to reflect real regional blocs, bringing in the Global South: Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Arab states. |
| 11 | Suspend the veto | Suspend the veto of a permanent member that commits mass atrocities or aggression, by extending Article 27(3) of the Charter. A French-Mexican initiative backed by around a hundred states already points this way. |
The last three proposals will run into the veto of those they target. We put them forward anyway, because a goal that is never stated has no chance of being reached.
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