Annan is proposing robust U.N. reforms

UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Kofi Annan will propose changes to the United Nations today, recommending the expansion of the Security Council to reflect modern realities of global power, the restructuring of the discredited Human Rights Commission to keep rights violators from becoming members and the adoption of a definition of terrorism that would end any justifications of its use for national resistance.

Annan will make the recommendations in a speech to the General Assembly aimed at restoring confidence in the United Nations that lapsed after bitter divisions over the war in Iraq, charges of mismanagement and corruption in the oil-for-food program and revelations of sexual misconduct by blue-helmeted peacekeepers.

Annan's proposals, drawn from the conclusions of an independent panel in November, will be the subject of a gathering of heads of government in September that hopes to reinvigorate the United Nations at a time when its value is being widely questioned.

The speech, while making the case for the relevance of a revised United Nations, will also be seen as a bid by Annan to shore up his stewardship. While he has maintained much of his once-vaunted reputation abroad, he has come under pointed criticism in Washington, where some members of Congress have called on him to resign before completing his term in office at the end of 2006.

"If any report has Kofi Annan's name all over it, it is this one," said Mark Malloch Brown, Annan's outspoken new chief of staff.

The measures were outlined in a 63-page report from Annan titled "In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All." The report was released Sunday after details from drafts emerged in The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.

Annan said the Human Rights Commission had been undermined by allowing participation by countries whose purpose was "not to strengthen human rights but to protect themselves against criticism or to criticize others." In recent years, the commission's members have included Cuba, Libya, and Sudan.

"As a result," he said, "a credibility deficit has developed, which casts a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole."

Annan recommended replacing the 53-nation Human Rights Commission with a smaller council, whose members would be chosen by a two-thirds vote of the 191-nation General Assembly, rather than by regional groups. "Those elected," he said, "should undertake to abide by the highest human rights standards."