How the UN confirmed its own growing irrelevance

Navalny eventually found himself in an Arctic penal colony known as the “Polar Wolf” because of its harsh conditions after a succession of trials ultimately resulted in him receiving prison sentences amounting to three decades’ worth of jail time.

He was held for periods in a tiny punishment cell and fed on a diet of stale bread and boiling water. Whether these harsh conditions ultimately resulted in his death, which was announced by the Russian prison authorities on February 16, is hard to fathom given the way the Kremlin has responded to his demise.

In the immediate aftermath of his death, rumours abounded about the exact whereabouts of Navalny’s corpse until it was eventually traced to the Salekhard District Clinical Hospital, where it was found to be covered with bruises.

Suspicions that he had been the victim of foul play deepened following reports that Russian intelligence officials from the same unit that was involved in the 2020 failed Novichok poisoning had flown to the prison shortly before his death.

All the more reason, or so one might think, for the UN to demonstrate its status as the final arbiter of events.

Yet, as has happened all too often in the past, the UN has merely ducked the issue in favour of supporting a flawed compromise – in Navalny’s case, allowing the Russians to investigate their own state-sponsored mistreatment of the Russian dissident.

Far from asserting its authority, it has simply confirmed its increasing irrelevance in global affairs.

‘Talking shop’

The UN’s recent track record in holding autocratic states like Russia to account for their wilful flouting of international law is hardly impressive.

Its response, for example, to Russia’s unprovoked military assault against Ukraine two years ago failed miserably to acknowledge the scale of the threat Moscow’s actions posed to the rest of the globe.

Russia’s presence on the Security Council, together with that of its close ally China, makes it impossible for Western diplomats to draft the type of unequivocal resolution condemning the Kremlin’s aggression that the invasion of Ukraine merited.

The UN’s impotence was reinforced when a watered-down motion put before the General Assembly that just called for Moscow to end hostilities only received the support of around two thirds of the 193 members.

While Belarus, North Korea, Syria and Eritrea – all close allies of Moscow – voted against the motion, of more concern were the significant number of countries, including Gulf states and a sizeable proportion of African nations, that abstained.

This worrying division – between those countries, such as the US, Britain and most of Europe, that condemn outright Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, and those, like South Africa, that see the conflict as an opportunity to reassert their opposition to the West’s historic dominance in world affairs – not only runs the risk of further territorial conflicts erupting around the globe (China’s long-standing ambition to reclaim Taiwan comes to mind), but also highlights the UN’s increasing irrelevance as a body with the moral authority to bring its influence to bear on issues of global importance.

It has simply become a talking shop where the conflicts and divisions of the day play out in microcosm.

“It started with the war in Syria,” says Karin von Hippel, director-general of the London-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “China and Russia would basically block everything so that nothing could get through the Security Council. Even humanitarian resolutions on the war in Syria, just to send food, would get blocked.

“We still need the UN, we just need a UN that works better. It needs to be fundamentally changed, and it is just not clear how that is going to happen or when.”