The United Nations needs to open its doors to elected representatives. The best way to achieve this is the creation of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly that would complement the General Assembly where the governments come together. I've been supporting this goal for a long time and congratulate the international campaign on its sustained efforts to make this a reality.
The establishment of a UN Parliamentary Assembly is an important proposal that I am delighted to support. To a great extent the UN Security Council is incapable of fulfilling its duty of maintaining international peace and security. The rise of the extreme right in some countries and the lack of diplomatic ability is undermining international collaboration. In this situation, a UN Parliamentary Assembly can help mobilize citizens and parliaments in support of the UN and help strengthen multilateralism and the international system.
Global governance is in crisis. The UN is in urgent need of institutional reform. A UN Parliamentary Assembly should be established in order to create a democratic connection between the world organization and the world's citizens. The international efforts towards this aim deserve broad support.
The United Nations would probably have to rest on two pillars: one constituted by an assembly of equal executive representatives of individual countries, resembling the present plenary, and the other consisting of a group elected directly by the globe's population in which the number of delegates representing individual nations would, thus, roughly correspond to the size of the nations.
The United Nations needs to become more democratic and representative. With this goal in mind, member states have been debating a reform of the Security Council for more than three decades and still there's no agreeable solution in sight. For those who want to see progress, it's time to consider a complementary step: the establishment of a UN Parliamentary Assembly. This assembly would represent the world's citizens, not the governments, and may achieve more in making the UN more inclusive than any expansion of the Security Council ever could.
It is important to me to promote the spread of the values of constitutional democracy and the rule of law across the world. A United Nations Parliamentary Assembly is an appropriate way to demonstrate these values to all nations and to ensure that the citizens of every country feel more connected to the UN and its programmes.
We need to promote the democratization of globalization, before globalization destroys the foundations of national and international democracy. The establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the UN has become an indispensable step to achieve democratic control of globalization.