The UN Charter turned 70 years old last Friday. But if you ask Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, the United Nations itself isn’t aging very well.
“After the Second World War, it was a great body,” Prosor told the audience at an Aspen Ideas Festival panel. In 1945, Prosor said, when the United Nations encompassed only the original 51 member states, it was a coherent body. But today, he argued, it has lost that coherence: “193 member states, out of which only 87, by UN standards, are being described as democracies. Over 100 countries have really no concept of what we’re talking about. You have a body that gradually is taken hostage, is taken over, by countries and sometimes even non-state actors that change the whole essence of what this body was initially established for.”
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