At long last, after the UN75 Declaration, Secretary-General António Guterres’s Our Common Agenda, a General Assembly modalities resolution, the High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism report and a decision by the president of the General Assembly regarding the scope of the September 2024 Summit of the Future, we are now a few short weeks away from the German and Namibian permanent representatives’ release of the “zero draft” of the summit’s chief outcome document, the Pact for the Future.
It is now imperative that member states begin to coalesce around a select number of ambitious, high-impact global governance innovations that they want to see make up the chief legacy of the summit.
For instance, at the UN60 Summit in 2005 — the last time a single intergovernmental summit reviewed the need for improvements across the entire UN system and related institutions — two marked achievements were: the creation of the UN peace-building architecture (the Commission, the Fund and the Support Office) and the upgrade of an enfeebled Human Rights Commission into an empowered Human Rights Council with new tools for safeguarding human rights, such as the widely acclaimed Universal Periodic Review.
Read the full op-ed in PassBlue.
