NEW YORK CITY—The United Nations and its member governments, with strong support from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), adopted a landmark agreement last week to bestow the U.N. with more power and influence in global affairs.
Among the key provisions is “transforming global governance” and further empowering international institutions across a range of issues, including “sustainable development and financing for development,” as well as “science, technology and innovation, and digital cooperation.”
The pact includes a Global Digital Compact to restrict “misinformation” and “disinformation” and a Declaration on Future Generations that encompasses the 2030 Agenda climate goals that include the phase-out of fossil fuels.
It is also part of transforming the U.N. into what the organization is touting in promotional materials as “U.N. 2.0.”
U.N. leaders and top officials from the CCP celebrated the pact as a historic effort to create a better future for humanity and increase global cooperation on international problems.
“We can’t create a future fit for our grandchildren with systems built for our grandparents,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said.
Despite opposition from various quarters, the 193-member body adopted the pact by consensus on Sept. 22 at the Summit of the Future during the U.N. General Assembly after about nine months of negotiations.
In the days before the pact was adopted, a coalition of U.S. lawmakers and grassroots leaders held a press conference on Capitol Hill criticizing the agreement as an effort to undermine national sovereignty and freedom.
“We can’t give up any more of our sovereignty, any more of our geopolitical integrity, or any more of our economic integrity to foreign actors who have no concerns for the United States of America other than to take our power and money away,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), former leader of the House Freedom Caucus.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Mike McCaul (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times that the pact ignores the “malign influence of the CCP” within the global organization.
McCaul said that although the pact isn’t legally binding, “this 66-page pact is limitless in scope.”
“It calls for dramatically increased public spending and vague action on countless left-wing priorities,” he said.
“The pact also completely ignores the most urgent issues facing the U.N. today, like reforming UNRWA and combating malign CCP influence. It does nothing to advance U.S. interests.”
The CCP, which plays an increasingly powerful role within the U.N., boasted about its significant role in developing the pact.
Speaking at U.N. headquarters, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi described the pact as an effort to “galvanize” the U.N.’s “collective efforts for world peace and development and to map out the future of humanity.”
Wang talked about advancing “global governance.”
On the other side, the Argentine government officially distanced itself from the pact and the U.N. in general.
“Argentina wants the freedom to develop itself, without being subjected to the undue weight of decisions that are alien to our goals,” said Argentine Foreign Minister Diana Mondino, noting that Argentinian authorities are pursuing a policy of freedom.
President Javier Milei, in his address to the U.N. General Assembly, called the organization a “multi-tentacled Leviathan that seeks to decide what each nation state should do and how the citizens of the world should live.”
Milei also criticized the global organization’s central role in prescribing what he called “crimes against humanity” in responding to the China-originated coronavirus.
He called the U.N. 2030 Agenda, which features prominently in the pact, a “supranational program of a socialist nature.”
The new pact makes repeated commitments to expedite the implementation of the U.N. 2030 Agenda, also known as the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
“We will urgently accelerate progress towards achieving the Goals, including through concrete political steps and mobilizing significant additional financing from all sources for sustainable development,” the pact reads.
The Sustainable Development Goals, which U.N. leaders described as the “master plan for humanity” when they were adopted in 2015, encompass everything from education and agriculture to health care and the environment.
After they were adopted, CCP-owned propaganda outlets around the world boasted that Beijing played a “crucial role” in creating the 2030 Agenda.
The U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission has been sounding the alarm for years.
“Since the U.S.–China Commission began tracking officials from the People’s Republic of China serving in leadership positions in international organizations, Beijing’s influence has only grown over key U.N. agencies responsible for funding and policymaking on a wide range of important issues,” the Commission told The Epoch Times.
“Contrary to the International Civil Servant Standards of Conduct, they [Chinese officials] use those positions [in the U.N.] to pursue China’s foreign policy goals,” the Commission said.
When asked about the concerns of U.S. policymakers and other critics, Guterres’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, defended the pact.
“The Pact for the Future is not about world government,” he said at a press conference. “It is about making an organization of independent, sovereign member states work better.
“It’s not as if anyone is granting the secretary-general authority over governments—clearly not.”
Still, according to Dujarric, it is important to increase global cooperation because “not one country can deal with the rising seas, not one country can deal with global pandemics, not one country can deal with international terrorism.”
“This is about bringing sovereign, independent countries, and working together,” he said, urging people to read original documents to become well informed and “make up their own minds.”
The strengthening of the U.N. and, in particular, efforts to have the U.N. secretary-general lead the response to emergencies, received special attention from opponents.
As The Epoch Times reported in April 2023, empowering the U.N. as the central force in dealing with international emergencies and “complex global shocks” was a key goal heading into the Summit of the Future.
Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Kevin Moley, who oversaw U.S. relations with the U.N. during the previous administration, warned of the dangers.
“Allowing the U.N. to deal with this is the equivalent of putting the CCP in charge of global emergencies,” Moley told The Epoch Times.
He warned that the CCP takeover of international organizations represents a potentially mortal threat to the West.
Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, told The Epoch Times that Americans must resist what he described as a “power grab” of historic proportions.
“The U.N. secretary-general has arrogated to himself dictatorial powers ... upon his mere proclamation of an ‘emergency,’ as defined by himself,” he said.
Boyle, who wrote the implementing U.S. legislation for the Biological Weapons Convention and serves on the board of Amnesty International, said that because of the involvement of heads of state and government in the process, the new U.N. pact could constitute a “treaty” with “legal obligations” under both domestic and international law.
Free Speech, Free Press
One of the major components of the U.N. deal, adopted as an annex to the pact, focuses on U.N. governance of artificial intelligence (AI). Wang said that the CCP “supports the U.N. in serving as the main channel in AI governance.”Another major concern for critics is the targeting of free speech in the Global Digital Compact, approved as an annex to the Pact for the Future.
Stating that it is protecting “information integrity,” the U.N. deal calls for drastically scaling up efforts to combat “hate speech,” “discrimination,” “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and more.
Global censorship about the COVID-19 pandemic, with YouTube removing content that went against the World Health Organization’s pronouncements, has been cited by opponents of the plan as an example of the threat.
The U.N. has also become more aggressive on this front. In 2022, at a World Economic Forum sustainability event, U.N. Undersecretary-General for Communications Melissa Fleming announced a partnership with Google.
“We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top,“ she said. ”We’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do.”
Fleming has also highlighted working with CCP-linked TikTok and recruiting “influencers” to promote U.N. messaging.
Asked about the U.N. partnership with Google, Fleming declined to comment.
The compact calls for “Internet governance” to be “global and multi-stakeholder in nature.”
“We will strengthen international cooperation to address the challenge of misinformation and disinformation and hate speech online and mitigate the risks of information manipulation in a manner consistent with international law,” the Global Digital Compact reads.
The repeated emphasis on the alleged “risks” of misinformation is one of the most concerning elements of the agreement, said Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and co-chair of the Sovereignty Coalition.
“We need only look back to the pandemic to see that these terms will be defined as anything that is counter-narrative to the U.N., the WHO, and their collaborators,” she told The Epoch Times, referring to the World Health Organization.
“Controlling the narrative by suppressing dissenting voices is an unconstitutional violation of freedom of speech. It is, moreover, a hallmark of totalitarianism, which begins with and relies upon censorship.
“Further, censorship deprives both individuals and nations of their sovereignty.”
Littlejohn has been working with U.S. lawmakers to protect U.S. independence from international organizations.
“Sovereign persons and nations make decisions concerning how they will govern themselves,” she said. “They are deprived of this decision-making process if they are denied access to the true facts upon which their decisions will be made.”
Littlejohn also said the pact should be understood as a treaty under the traditional definition. As such, treaties are required to be ratified by the U.S. Senate—something she said would be unlikely to happen.
