The Chronicle interview: Karel Kovanda, outgoing President of the Economic and Social Council - UN Chronicle - includes related articles on the charter on ECOSOC and Resolution 50/227 on restructuring ECOSOC - Interview

UN Chronicle, Spring, 1997 by Dafna Holtzer

"If you ask me what is my plan for this year, it is first to clarify what ECOSOC (the Economic and Social Council) should not do," says former Czech Ambassador Karel Kovanda in this conversation with the UN Chronicle. Mr. Kovanda, who was elected President of the Council in January 1997, spoke to Dafna Holtzer in March, just before leaving for Prague to take up his new appointment as Deputy minister for Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic, about retire and reorganization in the Council.

You were just elected as the new President of the Council. What are your objectives?

The Economic and Social Council is in great turmoil. On the one hand, there are people who think that it should not even exist. There are ambassadors in this town who don't want to have anything to do with it, who don't even want to hear about ECOSOC. On the other hand, there are people who feel that the Council should be the driving force of all economic and social activities of the UN system. Now, I don't know whether either of these extreme positions is one that I would agree with. But the fact is, even after a year of service as ECOSOC's Vice-President, I have not sorted out what its main objectives are.

So, if you ask me what my plan is for this year, it is first to clarify what ECOSOC should not do, because somebody else is doing it, for example, the General Assembly. By clarifying what ECOSOC should not do, it will become clearer what it really should do. This would be a first step.

And a second step sometime at a later date, and beyond my term - I would leave that to the next President - would be to take stock: "this is what ECOSOC does and should do", "this is what we really want to do", or "these are important things that we are missing".

Is the function of ECOSOC not clear enough within the Charter?

Shall we say, "gray is the theory, green is the tree of life". What the Charter says is gray theory. Everybody who has been around the United Nations for a bit can compare what the Charter says about ECOSOC and what ECOSOC really is. They will see that the congruence is not complete.

In practice, I came into the ECOSOC presidency and inherited an agenda for the Council which was based on history. We have gone through that agenda and identified items and reports which are being considered elsewhere. After a long and arduous discussion, we decided to scratch two agenda items and six reports completely. This is the beginning. We will continue to re-fashion and shorten the agenda even further.

Then we also reorganized the agenda. We put subjects together the way they belong logically; we created large agenda items containing a number of subsidiary items of similar nature. The net result was that, after finishing this reorganization, we had an agenda for the summer session of ECOSOC with 14 items, instead of the originally proposed agenda of 37 items.

Again, we have not finished. There are more things that will be reorganized, I hope, at the main session. But we are well on our way and are determined to "clear the brush" of ECOSOC. With the support of the Second and Third Committees and the President of the General Assembly, we will, I hope, be able to move this process of clearing the field further.

So this is the first big issue - clearing the brush, clearing the dead wood. And then the second issue comes: what is ECOSOC best prepared to do?

Here, I don't have any conclusive comments, but I will share with you some of the first things that are "bubbling up", so to speak. One thing that came up very early was humanitarian assistance. None of the other organs [of the United Nations system] is in such a position as ECOSOC to oversee and to advise the Department of Humanitarian Affairs. ECOSOC is well prepared to coordinate - and coordination is the raison d'etre of the Council - the different agencies that provide humanitarian assistance within the UN system. Another thing that came up was the follow-up to the major conferences, such as the Beijing Conference on women, the Copenhagen Conference on social development and the Istanbul Conference on human settlements. The third item was overseeing the regional economic commissions, which exist for every continent. If ECOSOC manages to end up focusing only on these three things, it could do them very well.

Reorganization is an important issue in ECOSOC under any circumstances, but particularly this year. Last year, the General Assembly adopted resolution 50/227 that contained much of substance concerning the way the Council runs its business. Slashing the agenda is, in fact, an implementation of one part of 50/227 which says in effect: "Do away with duplication; do away with issues which are no longer of interest". So, that is what we are doing: implementing 50/227. And I would like to push that much further.

What can you say about the discussion theme chosen for the high-level segment during the summer session in Geneva this year: "Fostering an enabling environment for development - financial flows, including capital flows;