Non-Aligned Movement Meeting in Egpyt this Week to discuss UN Reform

By Timothy Herrmann | May 7, 2012

The Ministerial Coordinating Bureau of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is meeting in the Red Sea resort city of Sharm-el-Sheik, Egypt this week in preparation for the 16th annual NAM Summit Conference to be held in Tehran in November later this year.

The coordinating bureau has announced that it will discuss the following:

A review international law; promotion and preservation of multilateralism; follow-up to the Millennium Declaration and the outcomes of major United Nations (UN) summits and conferences; the reform of the UN; disarmament; as well as international security, will also top the agenda.

The Department of International Relations and Cooperation also released an official statement saying that the meeting in Egypt seeks to “revitalize and strengthen the NAM and to reinforce the position of the movement on priority issues of concern to developing countries”.

While NAM began largely as a political organization during the 1960’s in response to Cold War tensions, it has since become more and more concerned with the economic progress and cooperation of its members which are made up largely of developing countries. The association currently maintains a membership of 120 members and has 17 observer states.

It seems very likely that the UN reforms that will be discussed concern the Treaty Body Reform process currently under way at the UN. In 2009 the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights initiated the reform process but it wasn’t until this year that state parties began to take a more dominant role. Many countries worry that the purpose of the OHCHR led reform is to further erode the sovereignty of states by strengthening the mandate of treaty bodies to go beyond the scope of their mandate in the way they interpret treaties. Currently, treaty bodies are only allowed to make recommendations on the way states comply with treaties, but their recommendations are not binding in any way. If treaty bodies are instead allowed to interpret treaties as they wish and see themselves as the final arbiters in the way states comply with treaties, the original meaning of a treaties may begin to change and might force states to comply with interpretations that they do not necessarily agree with.

Sources:

http://allafrica.com/stories/201205070272.html

http://www.ekantipur.com/the-kathmandu-post/2012/05/04/nation/officials-to-attend-nams-egypt-meet/234505.html

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/photo/2012-05/07/c_131573399_2.htm

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