By Amparo Plaza |

There are tensions, conflicts and small wars in many regions of the world’s population. It is constant factor of territorial strife. Man has specialized in violence without mercy. The people who suffer most are not only the children and women. Also the elderly, who have given their working lives to creating every home, every region, every country. And to providing peaceful places for their families, regardless of nationality, customs, languages, ethnicities, living together as brothers and sisters, working together to make the world a place of peace.

We can see that it was possible for people from Israel and Palestine – despite their differences – to live and work together in one place, because they learned and wanted to. Yet another war broke out there, a conflict over religion, over territory, over power. A decades-long conflict that prevents potentially thinking and empathetic people present from reaching a dialogue. The mutual leaders are driven by their past hatred, their desire for power and their desire to break the peace, with violence becoming more serious and violent, with so many innocent victims that there is no organism left to help them find a solution to the conflict.

But that mechanism was once created: the United Nations, in 1945. Intended to eliminate wars and human rights violations forever. But it is not functioning. The UN’s organisational structure prevents the application of its legal structure. Article 6 of the UN Charter states that UN member states can be expelled from the UN. Although since 1945 to date many UN member states have occupied, oppressed, exploited, imprisoned, tortured, taken away, killed or even exterminated peoples, none of them has ever been expelled from the UN.

This is because of three extreme systemic flaws. First, because the UN is based on treaties. Without a democratic constitution and associated structural provisions that make UN policies enforceable and regulations enforceable. Second, the fact that the UN granted itself immunity in 1945. This implies that it cannot be sued in any court for what it does wrong itself. Thirdly, because the five permanent members of the Security Council – USA, Russia, China, France and the UK – have veto power. Because those five countries have also attacked, occupied, oppressed and exploited peoples since 1945, it is inconceivable that they can ever be held accountable for that. At least as long as the current UN exists. 

The UN is becoming more blind, deaf and dumb every day. It has long since become incapable of upholding the values of the UN Charter. Let me give a few examples, which can be effortlessly supplemented with many others.

For example, the mass migration of people leaving their countries in search of life in peace and tranquility. More than 100 million people roam the world as refugees. In Colombia, for example, in the Darien River region, between Choco and Panama, more than two thousand people try to cross the river every day, drowning entire families. And those who reach the other side safely have to try to survive in the most dangerous and inhospitable jungle of all, the Darien jungle. These people are citizens of South America who see that their lives cannot be fulfilled in their countries, for lack of opportunities, because those in power are interested in making the poor even poorer so they can manipulate and abuse them. They are people trying to reach the US in search of the “American Dream”. The lucky ones who arrive are part of the cordon of misery because this dream, is just a dream. …they leave their country with all the illusions they had, impoverish more the original regions by losing their inhabitants. Statistics of these facts show where the law of black earned money and the strongest rules. Colombia is currently experiencing an unprecedented crisis where democracy is moving further and further away from the system of government that is completely eroding democracy. Consequently, we are waiting for a civil war with dire consequences for neighbouring countries and international relations.

What applies to Colombia also plays out elsewhere in South America: oligarchization, the concentration of power in the hands of a few. With illegally acquired money, they buy votes, corrupt society and can violate the rights of the people with impunity.

Another element present at the global level is human trafficking, in all areas where the victims are women and children, the strengthening of the market aimed at high economic benefits for the traffickers in human lives, the strengthening of inhuman industries such as the sale of human organs by chains of shadow organisations also looking for their monetary benefit.

In short, the world has “lost its north”, human values have disappeared and only stories remain.

The UN has now sufficiently proved its uselessness. 

Therefore, there is an urgent need to think about a new organisation capable of forming a new mechanism to end this chaos through concrete dialogue. The millions of refugees around the world, the many more millions of drug addicts, the thousands fighters, without trial rotting away in cells, against occupying powers, and all the world’s not-yet-born children who want to live safely the end of this century, may rightly demand it.

I see only one solution. There will have to be a new state system in the form of a federal form of state for the countries of South America. In addition, a federal state form for the countries of Central America. Both as building blocks of a transformation of the treaty UN into a World Federation. The same applies to Europe.  

The time of working with undemocratic and ineffective treaties is over. That treaties do not work was proven after World War I with the powerless League of Nations that failed to prevent World War II. The system of cooperation based on treaties after World War II is now also proving dysfunctional. The cooperation of countries in the European Union is accompanied by increasing conflicts and now also two wars on its (southern) eastern edge. South and Central America are going down by autocratic processes, driven by the power of money.

The future belongs to federalisation on a larger scale than at present: with well-designed federal constitutions, with governments accountable to parliaments, with parliaments with people trained in the values of human governance.

Amparo Plaza,

Colombian nationality, is a teacher linked to the Secretary of Education of the Department of Cauca, a lawyer with independent office, Prosecutor Pensioned by the Attorney General’s Office of the Nation of Colombia. She is also a painter. Amparo is member of the European Federalist Party and active in the promotion of the ratification of the Constitution of Federated States of Europe.