UN chief warns 80-year-old founding charter ‘not an a la carte menu’

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By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) -United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Thursday that the U.N. Charter was under assault like never before as the 193-member world body marked the 80th anniversary of the signing of its founding document.

“We see an all too familiar pattern: Follow when the Charter suits, ignore when it does not. The Charter of the United Nations is not optional. It is not an a la carte menu. It is the bedrock of international relations,” Guterres said.  

Countries regularly accuse each other of breaching the Charter, but few face concrete consequences. In recent years Russia and Israel have been called out by the General Assembly for violating the Charter with their wars in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, respectively. Both conflicts still rage.

In the past week, Iran accused the United States of violating the Charter with its strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and the U.S. justified them under the Charter as self-defense. 

The United Nations was born out of the end of World War Two and the Charter was signed in San Francisco by an initial 50 states on June 26, 1945. It came into force four months later with the aim of saving succeeding generations from war and upholding human dignity and the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.

While the United Nations had done a lot of good over the past eight decades, senior U.S. diplomat McCoy Pitt said the world body should not “overlook the shortcomings that limit the UN’s potential.”

“We regret that the U.N. has lost sight of its founding mission. In this regard, wars still rage on multiple continents,” he said. “The principles of the UN Charter must remain at the heart of this institution, not just as an agreement for a better world, but also as a continuing call to action.”

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Daniel Wallis)