Events Detail

Niranjan Deva-Aditya, Member, European Parliament, and Candidate for Secretary-General of the UN

The United Nations has come under heightened scrutiny in recent years. The Oil-for-Food scandal showed an embarrassing failure to prevent the diversion of funds and revealed questionable conduct by senior UN officials. Failure to prevent massacres in Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia and now Darfur call into question the organization’s capacity to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war. It is debatable whether the substantial financial and other resources expended by the UN have promoted social progress and better standards of life. For the first 44 years of its existence, the debilitating effects of the Cold War on the United Nations might have excused some of these problems, but this factor vanished over a decade ago.

NIRANJAN DEVA-ADITYA has been mentioned as a possible successor to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Although a Sri Lankan, he was elected to the UK Parliament and then the European Parliament, where he serves as Budget Rapporteur on the Development Committee. In 2005, he led the European Parliament’s delegations to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the UN High-level Conference on Global Aid Funding, and the UN World Summit. He has been appointed Ambassador-at-Large for Sri Lanka, and as Vishwa Keerthi Sri Lanka Abhimani.

To RSVP, please email name and affiliation to Richard Weitz at weitz@hudson.org.

Location: Betsy and Walter Stern Conference Center, Hudson Institute, 1015 15th Street, NW, 6th Floor, Washington, D.C.