Anticipating the 75th anniversary of the day the United Nations was brought into being, the Baha’i International Community (BIC) hosted an event to launch a statement marking the occasion, drawing some 200 participants from across the international and diplomatic communities. 

Entitled A Governance Befitting: Humanity and the Path Toward a Just Global Order, the statement raises questions about how systems of cooperation between nations can be deepened to better address contemporary challenges. 

“This statement is meant to serve not as a set of policy proposals, or even a definitive roadmap to a better future,” explained Juan Pacheco, the event’s master of ceremonies. “It is meant to foster discussion and hopefully serve as a springboard for new ideas and approaches.”

In addition to open discussion among attendees, the event included live and recorded reflections from UN officials, such as Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction; diplomats, such as H.E. Ambassador Alvaro Albacete of Spain, Deputy Secretary General at KAICIID; and academics such as Dr. Walter Dorn, Professor of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada. Practitioners at all levels and from around the world also offered perspectives. 

Many speakers emphasized the need to match growing interdependence between the peoples and regions of the world with increasingly unified and coordinated action. 

“We are all one, and we cannot exist separately from one another,” said Professor Azza Karam, Secretary General of Religions for Peace. “For one of us to thrive at the expense of another is for all of us to lose, and to lose deeply.”

Dr. Richard Ponzio, Director of the Just Security 2020 Program and a Senior Fellow at the Stimson Center noted, “Only when we realize what common principles people share—our common humanity—can we come to grips with big problems like the pandemic, climate change, and many others.” 

Advancement of international governance has been a concern of the Baha’i Faith since its founding. In the nineteenth century Baha’u’llah wrote of the need for an “all-embracing assemblage” at which the rulers and kings of the earth “must consider such ways and means as will lay the foundations of the world’s Great Peace amongst men.” 

Responding to this imperative, Baha’is were active in the League of Nations and present at the adoption of the UN Charter in San Francisco in 1945. Subsequently the BIC proposed a set of revisions to the Charter at the UN’s 10th anniversary, and released statements at its 50th and 60th anniversaries.

Building on the launch event, the BIC will continue to host small group discussions to explore concepts raised in the statement related to just and effective global governance. Those interested in joining such a conversation are welcome to fill out this form. 

Bani Dugal, Principal Representative of the Baha’i International Community, expressed the hope that the event would mark the beginning “of a series of conversations which will trickle up and down and eventually be part of a movement of change to bring us to the centenary of the UN, and a much more evolved world order characterized by equality, unity, lasting peace and understanding among the governments and peoples of the world.”