By Lucio Levi

Today, with the collapse of the great ideological barrier which for decades gave rise to distrust and hostility between the blocs, with each side investing in terrifying tools of mass destruction, the world has now entered a transitional period characterised by contradictory trends. On the one hand, we are witnessing the collapse of cohesion within states and international organizations – a trend which is particularly strong in the former communist sphere of influence but is also visible everywhere in the world. On the other hand, co-existing with this trend we have globalisation fostering the formation of regional organizations of states – the EU is the world leader in this respect – opening the way towards a new world order based on law and UN reform.

The end of the Cold War and the rise of the BRIC countries to the top of the world power hierarchy has revealed the obsolescence of the present UN institutions founded 60 years ago. At the same time, globalization has progressively eroded state sovereignties and posed the urgent question of strengthening and democratising the UN. Already by the end of the 20th century a new generation of international organizations had appeared: the WTO, created to govern the global market, and the International Criminal Court (ICC), established to defeat the culture of impunity and to pave the way for the rule of law at international level. This new phase of history opened the way to the decision of the UEF to become a member of the WFM (2004).

The International Criminal Court

The ICC represents the greatest achievement of the WFM since its foundation in 1947. WFM has played a leading role in the development of a trans-national NGO movement unrestricted by state borders. This is an important political and organizational innovation. The creation of the NGOs’ Coalition for the ICC – in the Rome Conference the coalition was made up of 250 NGOs, now it has overstepped the number of 2500 – introduces an extraordinarily efficacious new pattern of action which made it possible for it to exert a real influence on the course of the Rome diplomatic conference that drew up the ICC Statute. Bill Pace, the Executive Director of the WFM, was the spokesman of the coalition within the Rome Conference. I think that we can claim that the alliance between the Coalition and like-minded states provided the necessary critical mass for the creation of the ICC. Now the coalition is campaigning for the universal ratification of the ICC Statute. 113 states have already ratified it. As Kofi Annan asserted, “
The Coalition has demonstrated in very concrete terms how much can be achieved when civil society, governments and international organizations come together to tackle global problems. The Coalition has proved itself a true global partnership for justice.”

This year, states parties to the treaty have decided to incorporate  the crime of aggression in the mandate of the Court. It is a historic progress toward delegitimization of war.
 
The Campaign for a UN Parliamentary Assembly

The Campaign for a UNPA represents the federalist answer to the growing democratic deficit of the UN and the other international organizations. Globalization erodes state sovereignty and citizens have the feeling that their decision-making power is migrating toward global non-state actors that are not under their control. In our time everything has been globalized except democracy, that stops at state borders. If democracy is not globalized, globalization will destroy democracy. The world has much to learn from the experiment of the EU, since the European Parliament – the first supranational Parliament in human history – is the laboratory of international democracy.

The WFM Council meeting, held in Buenos Aires at the beginning of October, took place at the same time as an inter-parliamentary conference of the Latin-American Parliament (Parlatino), chaired by the Secretary-General of Parlatino, the Argentina’s Senator Sonia Escudero. The Latin-American Parliament supports the proposal of a UNPA. In 2008, a resolution was passed to this effect. The coincidence with the Parlatino’s conference offered to world federalists the opportunity to collect several new endorsements to the UNPA Campaign. Since 2007, around 1000 Members of Parliaments from over 90 countries expressed their support to the UNPA, representing over 100 million people from their constituencies.