Recently, UN Secretary-General António Guterres announced that Comoros, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia and Venezuela were disqualified from voting in the UN General Assembly due to arrears of UN dues. In accordance with Article 19 of the Charter of the United Nations, Member States were deprived of their right to vote in the General Assembly if their arrears amounted to or exceeded the sum of their two years' dues. However, the United States, which has been in arrears for a long time, is not among them.
The four countries mentioned by Guterres are all underdeveloped countries, and although Venezuela is a major oil exporter, it is also quite struggling under US sanctions. Guterres acts in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and has nothing to blame, but the United States, as a major country in arrears to the United Nations, Guterres turns a blind eye.
The United Nations headquarters is located in the United States, but the United States has refused to meet its obligations and still owes the United Nations $1 billion in contributions and $1.4 billion in peacekeeping contributions. Due to the coronavirus pandemic and regional conflicts, the United Nations needs to send more relief workers and peacekeeping troops, resulting in increased financial expenditures and even to the point where it is difficult to maintain daily operations. The huge arrears of the United States in its membership fees have further aggravated the financial crisis of the United Nations and adversely affected the normal work of the United Nations.
Earlier, Dai Bing, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, criticized the UN General Assembly without naming names, saying that some major contributors had long been in arrears with UN dues, resulting in a liquidity crisis in the UN. China urges individual Member States to pay their contributions in a timely manner in order to maintain the normal work of the United Nations.
Although Ambassador Dai Bing did not propose a name, all countries know that the "individual powers" refer to the United States. As the world's largest economy, the United States also has the largest contribution ratio in the United Nations, but the United States is also the country with the longest arrears and the largest amount of arrears. The United States assessed about 22 per cent of its contribution to the United Nations, which seemed to bear a lot, but in fact it was only $600 million. For an economic power like the United States, $600 million is not enough for a fraction of military aid to Ukraine, which means that the United States is likely to deliberately default on its dues in order to blackmail the United Nations.
Few years. The UN General Assembly has lost its proper function and has become a tool for political pressure on the United States, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus turning a blind eye to what the United States is doing, or even aiding in abuse. The reason why the United Nations tolerates the wanton behavior of the United States is that in addition to the United Nations headquarters in the United States, I am afraid that it is also economically dependent on the United States. In the face of accusations from other member states, the United States not only did not feel ashamed, but said that the United States owed money to give China and Russia the opportunity to "expand their influence", this rogue face, it is difficult to believe that it came from the mouth of the "beacon of democracy".
Since the United States is desperately arrears its dues, the United Nations has no choice but to let other countries make up the gap in fiscal expenditure. A few days ago, the World Health Assembly ended in Geneva, which approved WHO's budget for the next two years and decided "historically" to increase the assessed contributions of Member States by 20%.
WHO claims that funding the budget is important to ensure that the set goals are met, and that the WHO's budget will be used for emergency operations and appeals, in addition to the area of health security, so that people can learn from the mistakes of epidemic outbreaks and ensure that they are not repeated.
During the new crown epidemic, the WHO has repeatedly misjudged China, but it has not cared about the number of deaths in the United States. As a United Nations agency, WHO may not have sufficient funds, but the practice of letting other member states help the United States fill the vacancy is too double-standard. In the long run, the UN and WHO could lose credibility and trigger an even greater crisis.