by John Cryan

The UN Charter contains a flaw fatal. Its Security Council has five ‘permanent members,’ any of which can veto any action in either the Council or the General Assembly. Two of those five members are brutal dictatorships armed with nuclear weapons. One has the largest landmass of any country, the other the largest population. One is trying now to destroy and digest an adjacent country it claims is merely a renegade part of itself; the other is getting ready to do the same to another.

This crisis is big enough to blindingly illuminate the helplessness of the world’s premier international organization in the face of unprovoked war. If the vast majority of the 200-odd other nations of the world come together to oppose naked aggression by a UN member, they can do no more through the UN than issue condemnations and declarations.

Any attempt to rectify this state of paralytic impotence by amending the UN Charter can currently be stopped by a single ‘permanent member’ nation’s veto.

There is only one viable legal way around this dilemma: Create a new UN, and migrate all the willing and qualified over to it. This means first writing a new UN Charter.

The new UN Charter will look very much like the old, with four vital changes. First, veto power will reside in a majority vote of the Security Council’s permanent members. Second, any UN member nation which commits an unprovoked act of violent military aggression against any other member will have its voting rights suspended until such time as the UN determines. Third, the International Court, as a branch of the UN, will be empowered to convene trials of nations, individuals, and organizations who commit war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, humanitarian crises, etc., and issue enforceable prison sentences for convicted individuals, as well as levy costs against offending nations for damages and war reparations sufficient to restore the nation(s) harmed. And lastly, the old charter will be formally deemed replaced by the new.

Once the new UN Charter is ratified and in place, the new UN can continue operating out of all its existing agencies and physical facilities.

Any country that refuses to sign on to the new charter can be admitted as an observer without voting rights, and with the right to apply for full voting membership at any time. Qualifications for all nations accepted as full voting members will include binding pledges not to engage in unprovoked, aggressive military action. ‘Military action’ will be defined broadly, to include modern actions such as cyberattacks causing infrastructure damage and disinformation campaigns which affect elections or cause violent uprisings.

There will be opportunities in designing and writing a new UN Charter to eliminate post-World War II and post-colonial and other biases in the relative powers of member nations. These should mirror existing UN documents, particularly the Universal Statement of Human Rights.

Finally, an opportunity exists to enshrine what must be done to ensure universal human survival into the new UN Charter. To be effective, this statement should mirror the Triangle of Peace = The Triangle of Survival, and commit humanity as a whole to pursue the project of the Ten New Commandments.

If we do these things, we can end war, stop climate calamity, restore our biosphere, and save ourselves.