United Nations Parliamentary Assembly - Implementation

Implementation

There are six main options for creating a U.N. Parliamentary Assembly, according to various assessments.

Amending the UN Charter, possibly through a Charter Review Conference under Article 109 of the UN Charter, is a commonly cited possibility. This is difficult because it requires ratification by two-thirds of UN members, including all five permanent members of the Security Council. There have been only five amendments to the UN Charter since 1945, and none of them were done through the Article 109 process. Louis Sohn and Grenville Clark, in their 1958 book World Peace Through World Law, proposed establishing a UN Parliamentary Assembly through this method.

Another possibility is establishing the UNPA as a subsidiary body of the UN General Assembly. The General Assembly has authority to do this under Article 22 of the UN Charter. Erskine Childers and Sir Brian Urquhart endorsed this approach in their 1994 book, Renewing the United Nations System. The Committee for a Democratic UN also recommended the establishment of UNPA by Article 22 or by transformation of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in its report, Developing International Democracy. In 2006, the Council of Europe passed a resolution noting, "A decisive step towards the development of a UN parliamentary dimension could be the establishment of an experimental parliamentary committee with consultative functions for General Assembly committees."

It also can be based on the Community of Democracies.

Yet another option is to create the UNPA as a nongovernmental organization of democratically elected legislators. This would have the advantage of not requiring the cooperation of (sometimes dictatorial) national governments or world parliamentary organizations with dictatorial members, so only democratic legislators, parliaments and countries would be represented. The World Constitution and Parliament Association and other NGOs have attempted to set up workable parliaments. Heinrich critiqued this approach by saying, "If it did succeed on any scale, it would divert resources from pressuring governments on thousands of specific issues, which citizens are good at, into the operation of a pan-global institutional structure, which citizens' groups are ill equipped to do...And the resulting assembly would always be of doubtful legitimacy (who does it really represent?) and of unlikely value as an evolutionary starting point for a real world parliament."

A UNPA could be created through a stand alone treaty. This would have the advantage that as few as 20 or 30 economically and geographically diverse countries could establish a UNPA, and it could expand as more countries ratified the treaty. Strauss notes that this is the method by which most international bodies, such the World Health Organization, International Labour Organization, and International Criminal Court, were founded. The way to get started presumably would be to hold a conference of plenipotentiaries to draft the treaty; then the ratification process would begin.

It might also be possible to use and/or transform the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), which was granted observer status in 2002. The IPU's Second World Conference of Speakers of Parliament adopted a resolution stating, "We would greatly welcome more substantive interaction and coordination with the United Nations, and call upon the world body to resort more frequently to the political and technical expertise which the IPU together with its Member Parliaments can provide." Many national parliaments are currently not members of the IPU. Moreover, it is uncertain that the IPU itself would be supportive of such a proposal; a 2005 article by IPU Secretary-General Anders B. Johnsson opined, "It makes little practical or political sense to set up a separate parliamentary assembly alongside the existing governmental General Assembly." Indeed, the Inter-Parliamentary Union seems to favor a reformed IPU as a substitute for a UNPA, saying, "The Union had the necessary experience, and further bureaucracy should be avoided."