Major compromises may salvage UN summit

UNITED NATIONS, Tuesday (Reuters) U.N. diplomats struggled to save this week's world summit from collapse after dropping contested language on terrorism, human rights and other issues in a document 150 world leaders are to approve.

Negotiations among a core group of 32 ambassadors ahead of the three-day summit that begins today are expected to continue through the night. But some envoys fear that an ambitious blueprint on global security, human rights and extreme poverty will be reduced to pious expectations.

"This is not a 60-minute clock like football," U.S. Ambassador John Bolton told reporters. "We've got time. We're going to keep working."

British Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry said the document established parameters for substantial reforms. "It's probably not as great as any of us would have liked but I am quite confident it is an outcome we can defend," he said."

Yet several nations, including Cuba, Sudan, Syria as well as the Palestinians, want to renegotiate parts of the document settled in sub-groups, diplomats said.

"The problem is that individual members are seeking to reopen disputes that are already resolved and we can't let that happen," said Jadish Koonjul, ambassador of Mauritius.

As head of the 25-member European Union, which collectively pays 38 percent of the U.N. dues, Britain drafted several compromise provisions that delegates accepted.

On terrorism, the draft deletes a definition that would describe deliberate killings of civilians as unjustified. But it also skips Arab proposals that would refer to the right to resist foreign occupation. Bolton is also pushing for fundamental reform of the way the United Nations is managed, following a year-long investigation into mismanagement and corruption in the oil-for-food program for Iraq.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Western nations want to move executive control from the General Assembly to the U.N. secretariat, run by Annan, but with tighter auditing. However, developing states that have a majority in the assembly want to keep control of the budget.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, conferring with leaders from Pakistan, Tanzania and others, said there had to be "real" management reform for the United States to support the document, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

On human rights, the document will establish a Human rights council to replace the discredited Geneva-based 53-nation Human Rights Commission. But to the dismay of the United States, Canada, Europeans and others, Russia and China insisted that the General Assembly had to decide later on criteria for membership.

The West wanted a two-thirds majority of the 191-member assembly to ensure that the council is not dominated by abusers.

European ambassadors have in general endorsed the reform package proposed by Annan to halve poverty in the next 10 years, reduce the threat of war and terrorism, and advance human rights in the 21st century.

But the United States has resisted some language that would obligate it to increase foreign aid, which developing nations see as an exchange for U.N. reforms and human rights.

However, much of the compromise language Bolton has proposed on development has been accepted. Another new development is general agreement on the responsibility to intervene in various ways when civilians are threatened by genocide. India still objects to the phrase "responsibility to protect" after dropping its insistence that no veto should be used in the Security Council in case of intervention to prevent genocide.

Canadian Ambassador Allan Rock, whose government came up with the concept, said he was pleased with the language so far because it expressed a "commitment to act in a timely and decisive manner in cases of potential genocide or ethnic cleansing."

"It doesn't mean there'll always be something done to stop it. But it means it's that much more difficult for those who would take no action and that much easier for those who advocate a response," Rock said.