Presidents and Prime Ministers come and go. The UN machine persists.

The United Nations began as an entity where governments could talk instead of shooting at each another. Seven decades later, it has grown into a mammoth bureaucracy. With each passing year, the list of UN conventions, declarations, covenants, protocols, frameworks, and accords grows ever longer.

The newly-minted Global Migration Compact (which will henceforth also be known as the Marrakech Compact on Migration) begins by referencing no less than 27 other UN instruments concerning everything from sustainability to gender discrimination, to disabilities, to children, to something called the New Urban Agenda. These people are meddling in every corner of our lives.

Communication goes in one direction only. Top-down. From them – on their high thrones in Geneva – to us. This is an anti–democratic institution.

Ordinary people have no mechanism by which to call these busybodies to account. Since we didn’t vote them into office, we have no ability to turf them out. We have no means of objecting, no way of insisting that UN priorities are not our priorities.

Presidents and Prime Ministers come and go. The smug, bloated, out-of-touch UN machine persists. Winning some, losing some. Playing the long game.

Key insight: UN personnel have no reason to fear – or respect – the public.

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LINKS:

• The UN’s Secretary General insists climate change is humanity’s “absolute priority.” Ordinary people disagree. I’ve mentioned before that the UN has been running an online poll since 2013. People from around the world are invited to select the six issues they care most about from a list of 16. With nearly 10 million votes cast, the public ranks climate change dead last. There is a Grand Canyon-sized disconnect between what the UN cares about and what matters to people on the street.
• my previous commentary, UN Pact Doesn’t Define ‘Migrant’
• UN Migration Pact: Normalizing State Censorship
• At the Morocco Meeting on Migration

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