The crisis of the United Nations and its universal human rights system

When representatives from 50 nations gathered in San Francisco between April and June 1945, the world was emerging from two world wars that had claimed more than 100 million lives and exposed the darkest depths of human cruelty. The Preamble of the Charter they signed on June 26, 1945, began with a fundamental commitment: we are "determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind."

The UN was conceived then not as a journey toward utopia, but as a mechanism to prevent the worst. As Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General, evoked in the context of the looming Cold War: "It has been said that the United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell"³. This phrase, uttered just ten years after the organisation's founding, captures its pragmatic essence: it is not about world government or international liberal utopia, but rather an institutional mechanism for managing conflict between powers in a world overshadowed by nuclear weapons.

However, 80 years later, that fragile agreement is once again in crisis.