What goes on at the UN?

I have heard time and time again people state that the UN is a useless bureaucracy, a pointless attempt at an impossible. Having read the biographies of some of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and of the UN Charter I always found it hard to believe that these intelligent, purpose driven people could have possibly thought up and founded an organization whose mission was impossible to achieve, so I set out to answer the unasked question found in all the assumed statements. What I found will be of interest to many and of worry to most.
The UN is the one place where the powers of a nations executive branch go the most unchecked, so all that your president cannot do because of obvious constraints in domestic policies he is at full liberty to promote at the UN for other nations of the world to enjoy or suffer. Usually the nations enjoying presidential decrees in the form of UN resolutions are the developed nations with the developing nations suffering the consequences of most of them.
This is due in great part to an unspoken tendency, which has been in the rise since the Clinton years, to allow for the overt intervention of some civil society groups (such as World Population Action) in the drafting of resolutions in the areas the EU and Democrat US governments consider is of their interest.

Many will ask what are resolutions? Well they are these documents that come out of yearly meetings that set the agenda for all the grassroots work, that many developing country citizens will be familiar with, done by the UN agencies (UNESCO; UNICEF; UNFPA; UNDP; Etc). This is of course all done with the money each member country contributes hence by those countries tax payers money. It will interest many who are concerned with the plight of the poor, those who continual contribute to charities, that part of what they give goes to programmes that have clearly not worked because of the misguided resolutions accepted without reservation by UN delegates from the civil society groups that they prefer.

They are misguided resolutions because they usually do not address the entirety of the problem, such as the need for clean water in the prevention of maternal death due to infections after childbirth, but rather focus on providing tubal ligations, indifferent to these womens preferences, indifferent to what is causing the most deaths, and indifferent to tested programmes of primary health care and provision of clean water, instead of unasked for tubal ligations, in places such as Venezuela that have managed to have maternal deaths.

Considering all of this is behoves us all to pay closer attention to this global institution and its actions because that is were part of our taxes are going and it should therefore worry us at least to some extent that types of programmes that we might unknowingly be funding.

Now not all is grey at the UN, there are policies that get passed that have done a lot of good and have also gone very much ignored by the media, at the same time there are civil society groups that are working towards the promotion of long term integral solutions to problems such as poverty, maternal death, illiteracy, AIDS, malaria. Unfortunately these groups are not payed much attention to as they are not in favour with the EU and the US under the Democrats.

One such group, that I found in my research, is the World Youth Alliance, www.wya.net, that was founded just 10 years ago by a young woman concerned with the bent UN policies were taking. Ten years on this coalition of young people continues to struggle for policies that address the totality of the problem and centre on the inherent dignity of the human person. Ten years on this continues to be an ignored topic by those that hold weight at the UN in detriment to most countries in Africa, Latin America and South East Asia that clamour for juster policies and financing that address the real problems they face. I imagine they are ignored because they are young and because what they propose would imply a better more supervised structure of funding, long term programmes that would take longer to produce results but whose results would provide that sought after relief of misery so many deserve and it would imply self revision of those very countries that do not allow for integral policies to leave the drafting table. Below I have attached a youtube video of one of their statements at a recent Conference at the UN, it is interesting to see how logic and full of common sense it is and ironic to consider that none of their common sense references made it past the proposal stage. What are you thinking UN delegates? Is not the family important to the integration of all the members in a society?