From Silence to Accountability: Why the United Nations Must Break with Complicity

UNITED NATIONS, 18 Aug 2025

Koenraad Priels – TRANSCEND Media Service

“Justice is love in action.” – Cornel West

11 Aug 2025 – For all its lofty charters and declarations, the United Nations today sits at a crossroads. On paper, it remains the custodian of humanity’s highest ideals – universal human rights, peace, and sustainable development. In practice, large parts of the UN system now function in a disturbing state of structural complicity with the very forces perpetrating crimes against humanity, systemic ecocide, and the mass impoverishment of billions.

This statement is not made lightly. It arises from years of research, legal action, and UN‑recognized evidence demonstrating that the global financial architecture – dominated by rentier capitalism and its debt‑driven, interest‑bearing Ponzi scheme – is not merely “unsustainable.” It is criminal from first principles: mathematically incapable of functioning without generating mass poverty, ecological collapse, and systemic rights violations. And yet, it enjoys tacit endorsement, legitimisation, and even partnership from the highest levels of the international system, including UN agencies.

The Heart of the Complicity

Complicity does not always wear a uniform or wield a weapon. It often comes in the suit‑and‑tie of diplomacy, the euphemism of “policy dialogue,” or the seal of a General Assembly resolution.

The UN’s complicity lies in three interlocking practices:

1. Embedding corporate and rentier power into its governance and funding – Through partnerships such as the UN Global Compact and dependence on voluntary corporate contributions, the UN allows major financial and extractive actors to shape agendas, filter policy, and whitewash their reputations under the banner of sustainable development.
2. Greenwashing with the Sustainable Development Goals – The SDGs, in principle a blueprint for justice, have been absorbed into a framework where the financial engines of harm – particularly interest‑based debt regimes and rent extraction – are left untouched. Pursued within a rentier capitalist framework, they become a form of institutionalised deception: promising sustainability while locking states into perpetual growth, austerity, and extractive dependency.
3. Failure to investigate and address structural causes – Whether in extreme poverty, climate collapse, or armed conflict, UN bodies have largely refrained from naming the macro‑economic architecture as a primary perpetrator of rights violations. While Special Rapporteurs occasionally break this silence, the system as a whole defaults to “neutrality” – a stance which, in the face of overwhelming evidence, becomes a form of endorsement.

In legal terms, when an authority is aware of credible evidence of ongoing crimes against humanity and foreseeable ecocide, yet fails to act, it enters the space of dereliction of duty and de facto collaboration.

A Pattern Seen Before

History has seen this before. At Nuremberg, it was established that “following orders” or “maintaining neutrality” did not absolve institutions or individuals from responsibility for mass atrocity. Today, structural violence is less visible but no less deadly: poverty remains the world’s largest killer, and ecocide accelerates under global economic rules that the UN has the power – and the legal obligation – to challenge.

Yet instead of wielding its mandate to confront these realities, the UN’s central organs have normalised working within the logic of rentier capitalism, managing its side‑effects rather than dismantling its root causes. This is the moral inversion of its founding norms.

Why Incremental Reform Will Fail

There is an understandable temptation to call for “better implementation” of existing policies, “enhanced coordination,” or “more ambitious targets.” But these are palliative measures applied to a man‑made disease whose pathogen lies in the operating system of the global economy.

No amount of efficiency tweaking can reconcile a debt‑driven, interest‑based financial system with the binding human rights obligation to prevent avoidable harm. As the P ≠ P + I paradox demonstrates, the need for perpetual economic expansion to service interest mathematically guarantees breaches of ecological ceilings and social foundations alike.

A UN that continues to operate inside this framework will remain, at best, a crisis manager for corporate–state power and, at worst, a silent partner in systemic plunder.

The Paradigm Shift Required

If the UN is to break from complicity and reclaim its legitimacy, it must undergo a profound paradigm shift – one that is both institutional and normative:

1. Adopt a Human Rights Economy Mandate – Recognise explicitly that economic systems incompatible with universal human rights and planetary boundaries are unlawful. This would oblige the UN to name and challenge rentier capitalism as structurally criminal.
2. Criminalise Systemic Ecocide, Genocide, and Militarism at the Structural Level – Push for binding international law recognising macro‑economic arrangements and militarised resource grabs as prosecutable crimes against humanity.
3. End Corporate Capture of Policy – Prohibit conflicts of interest in UN partnerships, delink funding from corporate influence, and restore independence in agenda‑setting.
4. Enforce Truth‑Telling as a Duty – Every UN agency should be required to report systematically on the root structural causes of poverty, ecological collapse, and conflict, not just their symptoms.
5. Create an International Tribunal for Structural Crimes – A twenty‑first‑century Nuremberg process for systemic state–corporate crimes, with investigative powers that extend beyond national jurisdictions and include economic governance.

From Manager of Contradictions to Guardian of Humanity

The choice is stark. The UN can remain an institution that manages the contradictions of a criminal economic order – issuing well‑phrased communiqués while inequality deepens and ecosystems collapse. Or it can become what its Charter promised: a guardian of human dignity, rights, and peace.

Making that choice requires courage. It requires accepting that neutrality in the face of systemic harm is not neutrality at all – it is complicity. And it requires taking sides: openly, unapologetically, with humanity, life, and truth.

History will not remember the UN for the number of conferences it convened or reports it issued. It will remember whether, in the decisive moment, it chose to protect the criminal order or to dismantle it.

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Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher and social-ecological activist whose work focuses on the systemic links between financial architecture, systemic violence, ecocide, and global inequality.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 18 Aug 2025.

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