Democracy and The United Nations
For the UN, the importance of democracy and of democratic values was first highlighted in the Charter of the United Nations, as well as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This in turn has been echoed in a variety of documents – declarations, conventions, covenants, most notably the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which contains binding obligations on States Parties in respect of elections, freedom of expression and association and assembly and other vital democratic entitlements. In the 1990s, a period characterised by important changes in various parts of the world, democracy has also become a theme of a number of international conferences, and major UN organs, including the General Assembly, pronounced themselves on ways to strengthen democracy.
This process was matched by increasing operational activities in support of democratisation processes by the UN System. In particular, in 2000 the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) placed democratic governance at the heart of its development cooperation programme, equipping itself with greater internal expertise in this area and channeling a substantial proportion of its core resources in this direction. Another significant development was the establishment in 1992 of the Electoral Assistance Division within the Department of Political Affairs.
The links between international peace and security, sustainable human development and democratization were all embraced again by the international community with the unanimous adoption of the Millennium Declaration at the Millennium Summit in 2000.
Read more about this topic: United Nations Democracy Fund
Famous quotes containing the words democracy, united and/or nations:
“In a democracy everybody has a right to be represented, including the jerks.”
—Chris Patten (b. 1944)
“I incline to think that the people will not now sustain the policy of upholding a State Government against a rival government, by the use of the forces of the United States. If this leads to the overthrow of the de jure government in a State, the de facto government must be recognized.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Poetry is the most direct and simple means of expressing oneself in words: the most primitive nations have poetry, but only quite well developed civilizations can produce good prose. So don’t think of poetry as a perverse and unnatural way of distorting ordinary prose statements: prose is a much less natural way of speaking than poetry is. If you listen to small children, and to the amount of chanting and singsong in their speech, you’ll see what I mean.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)