On Wednesday 20 September, the president of the European Council, Donald Tusk, called for a "more energetic and less bureaucratic" United Nations during a speech to the 72nd United Nations General Assembly in New York.
"We expect the UN to become a more energetic, and a less bureaucratic organisation that can act with clarity and purpose in all its actions. Therefore, the EU considers the reform ideas of the UN currently on the table as the necessary minimum", Tusk stated.
In Tusk's view, "the United Nations is the best tool we have to address, on a global scale, today's conflicts, famine, forced displacement, terrorism, and a return to nuclear tensions. For the EU and its member states, it is imperative that the UN rise to these challenges", including combatting radicalisation, he added.
"The UN remains a vital forum to debate and a tool to implement our collective will, even if it has declined in popular esteem in recent years", Tusk said, urging leaders to demonstrate that the UN is a gathering of people "who have not given up on the ethical dimension of politics in the name of their own egoistic interests".
"Making international action robust, credible and transformative is the challenge. The European Union will never give up working with and within the United Nations until we meet this challenge", Tusk stated. "Our European priority will always be to vigorously react against evil, violence and lawlessness in international life. In confrontation with evil, the EU and the UN cannot hesitate. The UN is not there to cowardly look for a compromise with evil, but to mobilise the global community in the fight against it. Therefore, a moral judgement of reality, clear and univocal, should be the first principle of our common action", he said. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)