Modifying Of U.N. Charter Urged

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30681, 22 February 1965, Page 13

Modifying Of U.N. Charter Urged

(N.Z.P A.-Reuter—Copyright) NEW YORK, Feb. 21. U Thant said yesterday that the United Nations charter was out of date and was part of the cause of the present constitutional and political crisis of the United Nations.

“Our approach to peace is often old-fashioned and more attuned to former times than to our present state,” declared the United Nations SecretaryGeneral. U Thant took particular issue with the charter’s chapter VII, which alone provides for mandatory action by the Security Council in the case of threats to—and breaches of —the peace and acts of aggression. Its provisions, he said, related back to the Axis Powers’

aggressions of the 1930s—“a kind of situation which is unlikely to recur in our world of super-Powers—armed with hydrogen bombs amid a vastly increased number of smaller independent states.” In his remarks on the charter, in what United Nations officials called a major policy speech, the Secretary-General said changes in alignments since the war, with old comrades falling out and old enemies becoming friends, had rendered the United Nations basic document somewhat out of date. “It is this anachronism in the charter—the kind of anachronism which is inevitable in our rapidly changing world—that is partly responsible for the present constitutional and political crisis in

the United Nations,” he said. The United Nations today must work towards a world in which aggressive nationalism is banned as a means of promoting or protecting national interests, where fanaticism is no longer required to support a different point of view and where diversity could be preserved without prejudice and hatred. It was not enough to be active only when a dire international emergency broke out, the Secretary-General said. Although the United Nation’s current problems were great and its present authority uncertain, he said, it did provide a forum in which the important divisions in the world could be discussed and gradually reduced. “We must eventually arrive, in the affairs of the world, at a state of political maturity in which it will be consideredstatesmanlike, rather than weak, for even a great country to alter its course . . . in deference to the will of the majority,” he said. “I hasten to add that we are certainly nowhere near to such an idyllic situation today.” The disagreements of the greatest Powers must not be allowed to disrupt and stultify the United Nations. The crisis over peace-keep-ing arrears was depressing, U Thant said, for the damage done to the effectiveness and dignity of the United Nations, but heartening for the loyal and unceasing efforts of member States to preserve their organisation by finding a solution. They were witnessing now the start of the great debate, whether the big Powers in unison in the Security Council should take exclusive responsibility for maintaining

the peace while the General Assembly functioned as “a glorified debating society in political matters,” or whether an attempt should be made to secure a fair, equitable and clearly defined distribution of functions of these two principal organs in the light of changing circumstances.