Explain the key purposes of the UN [15]

The United Nations was established through the San Francisco Conference in 1945 with current membership now at 193 states. It is the successor to the failed League of Nations. Its principle aims, spelled out by its founding Charter, are to safeguard peace and security. Furthermore it also seeks to to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, to uphold respect for international law and to promote social progress and better standards of life globally.  First and foremost the UN aims to safeguard peace and security throughout the world. Ultimately the UN is there to create a system of collective security that can displace a reliance on violent methods to resolve issues. Collective security is the political theory of states pledging to defend one another in order to deter aggression or to punish a transgressor. The UN has involved itself primarily in peacekeeping, although this is developing into peace building as well. The current UN peacekeeping missions include monitoring of the Kashmir region, mainly revolving around keeping peace between India and Pakistan. However the most famous is the strong multinational peacekeeping force to act a physical barrier between Israel and Egypt following the Suez crisis of 1956. However, this has developed to peace building acknowledging that longer term strategies are needed to create sustainable peace and security in the region. A more contemporary example of this is may be seen as South Sudan. The UN has also intervened militarily in the past, most notably in Korea in 1950 and the Gulf War in 1991.  In addition the UN also believes in the upholding international human rights and law. This is a primarily liberal aim believing that the international sphere is a moral sphere and so core ethical principles should be codified within the framework of international law. A notably example of this is the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was created by the United Nations. Another, less successful example would be the ICC, which has seen little success. In contrast, the UN Security Council has also created circumstances in which international tribunals can once again be established, making it easier for international and humanitarian law, in particular, to be upheld. This includes tribunals on the massacres and ethnic cleansing in conflicts such as the former Yugoslavia Republic and the atrocities in Sierra Leone to control it’s diamond mines. Overall these tribunals have seen far more success than cases brought to the ICC.  Finally, the UN plays a large role in aiming to promote social progress and better standards of life across the globe. This is evident in the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the majority of member states aiming to combat poverty, gender inequality, child mortality, HIV and AIDs, malaria and resolve environmental sustainability by the end of 2015. There have been some major successes with this, for instance the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day has been halved in 2010, but one billion will still be living on this amount in 2015. Equally, many diseases such as polio and small pox have been near eradicated all over the world due to the work of UN organisations such as WHO and UNICEF. Many believe that the UN is better suited to these areas of policy such as health and poverty where they have had far more success as opposed to the security and peace aims which has a more negative legacy. However this said, it’s main principle aim is still to safeguard peace and security through collective security.