Agenda

Millennium Summit & Forum

Relationship of NGOs and Civil Society to the UN System

by
Tina Schaffer

Since the founding of the United Nations in 1945, civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become increasingly important to the process of international policy making.

The term “civil society” may mean a variety of things. For example it could mean a part of a community bound together by common interests and standards that relate to the state as a political body. Another way to define “civil society” is as an organized group of community members who work within a set of legal norms that allow them to interact with the government of the sovereign state in which they reside. In other words, civil society is a mechanism for people to participate in the process of cooperating and bargaining for public policy by peacefully conveying their ideas through nonviolent behavior. Organizations in civil society often develop in response to the inability of their governments to adequately provide the people with certain basic needs. Some of those needs include health care, environmental preservation, or a better infrastructure. Some forms of civil society grouping together are political parties, interest groups, and political organizations.

Another common grouping that may form from civil society is non-governmental organizations, also known as NGOs. “NGOs are a basic form of popular participation and representation in the present-day world.” The United Nations’ Economic and Social Council defines NGOs as non-profit organizations that do not advocate the use of violence and are not a school, university, or a political party. Another stipulation determining if a group is accepted as an NGO is that “any concern with human rights must be general, rather than restricted to a particular communal group, nationality, or country.” Also, governments cannot fund, create, or formally be associated with NGOs.

NGOs have a number of functions. Their work ensures that issues governments would otherwise ignore are put on the agenda. They also monitor a government’s rhetoric versus its actual implementation of policies. NGOs bring international and public awareness to issues such as the protection of human rights, environmental concerns, rural demining operations, the promotion of democracy, and peace and security issues.

Although NGOs seem to be the peoples’ voice in international policy, there has been much debate in the United Nations as to how much influence NGOs should have. As set out in Article 71 of the United Nation’s Charter, NGOs are only given consultative “arrangements” with ECOSOC; they have no rights with any other organ of the UN. Over the years the “arrangements” noted above have evolved into actual consultative “status” in the United Nations through the Economic and Social Council. The term “consultative status” clearly indicates a secondary role; NGOs are only to give advice on issues and have no role in the official decision-making process.

An NGO’s status in the United Nations determines the level of participation the group engages in. There are three levels of consultative status as established in ECOSOC Resolution E/1996/31: general consultative status, special consultative status, and inclusion on the Roster. General status, the lowest level of status, is given to large international NGOs whose work is so broad that it covers most of the issues on ECOSOC’s agenda.  Special status is the next level of status and is given to NGOs who have special expertise and competence in only a few areas on the agenda. The Roster is the highest level of consultative status an NGO can obtain and it allows them to make useful contributions to the UN by being available for consultation upon the request of any UN body. Regardless of status, in most cases, NGOs are not allowed to table their own written texts for governments to discuss, and they still do not have any formal negotiating role in any UN body’s deliberating processes.

More recently, NGOs have reached a new level of involvement: partnership. The term partnership alludes to equality between governments and NGOs while it still leaves them very distinct from each other. It must be understood that the partnership here is not in legal form; it is simply a phrase that is being used quite often. Though it includes many rights NGOs have never been entitled to before, there is still a long way to go before there is a true equality between the two. With the term partnership becoming more popular over the last few years, NGOs have found more participation opportunities such as “having the right to be participants in, but not members of, most intergovernmental policy making bodies in the UN system.” This means that NGOs have the right to participate in, but not vote on, agenda topics. Also, “when NGOs speak they can comment on UN programs, propose new policy objectives, and respond to the general debate. However, they are not supposed to exercise influence on the precise text of a resolution, declaration, or convention that governments are going to adopt.”

NGOs also have more influence in UN Conferences. NGOs played major roles at the conferences held in Ottawa, Rio de Janeiro, and Beijing. The Ottawa conference, which focused on landmines, shows how much pressure the efforts of NGOs, through campaigning and lobbying, can put on Member States. The conference included fifty governments that were pledging support for the ban on landmines, twenty-four observing states, several international organizations, and dozens of NGOs in attendance. NGOs around the world pushed extensively for the abolition of antipersonnel landmines by singling out countries that did not support the cause, and heightening public awareness to the issue at hand. NGOs found public support in favor of the ban flourishing and used this support against South Africa, one of the major opponents of the ban. Two days before the conference, South Africa pledged its support for a complete ban, mostly due to the high level of pressure they faced from public opinion.

At the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, ECOSOC created a new subgroup for NGOs, telling them that they could attend the commission but no other meetings. The list was called the Roster of NGOs from Rio. Beijing’s Conference on Women took a similar approach of making a roster of the NGOs involved at the conference. This allowed the new NGOs accredited at the conference to take part in the work involved. These approaches led to the extensive participation reached by NGOs at the conference known as Habitat II.

Habitat II enabled NGOs to participate more than ever in the drafting and preparatory process. NGOs were allowed to sit alongside governments and submit their own amendments to the texts. The delegates at Habitat II allowed the NGOs to play this type of role because they felt that local organizations had a central role in policymaking for cities; this action also continued the push for equality between governments and NGOs.

ECOSOC has furthered NGO involvement by setting up a committee that focuses only on NGOs and applications for consultative status by groups not yet recognized by the UN’s Committee on Non-Governmental Organizations. Recently, this body put together a draft resolution calling for the “Strengthening of the Non-Governmental Organizations section of the United Nations Secretariat.” This resolution calls for the Secretary-General to evaluate the organizational structure and technical, financial, and personnel resources of the Non-Governmental Section and provide necessary resources to help the Section without taking away from development programs.

There is also opposition to NGOs gaining higher status in the United Nations. Some NGOs oppose higher status because their own agendas may conflict with the agenda of the United Nations. Also, some NGOs receive greater resources from private and public sources in part because they are separate from the United Nations. Some oppose greater NGO involvement because NGOs are not always considered democratic in their representation of popular opinion. Some Member States have opposed them because they see NGOs as a threat to national sovereignty. These Member States know that if an NGO is doing its job it will look into how countries are approaching human rights and that they may start to criticize the Member States who have not reached an appropriate level of behavior.

Questions for further consideration:

1) What is the appropriate level of influence NGOs should be granted in the United Nations? Should this change with the different bodies of the UN? Should NGOs be permitted any access to the Security Council? 
2) How could the issue of national sovereignty be dealt with in order to allow NGOs greater participation in the United Nations? 
3) Who should bear the cost of NGO activities in the UN? For example, many NGOs in Africa can not afford to come to New York to attend the UN meetings or even the conferences held around the world. Should NGOs still be allowed to receive donations in the way they do now? Should NGOs get further funding from the UN? If so, where will this extra money come from in the already limited UN budget? 
4) What NGOs, if any, should be allowed greater status: community, local, national, regional, or international? How can we promote cooperation between the various levels of NGOs and between NGOs and Member States?