United Nations

The world's preeminent international organization, the United Nations (UN), has played a role in almost every major international controversy since World War II. Its primary forums are the Security Council, with its five permanent members, and the General Assembly, which includes all the nations of the world. The UN's primary functions include the pursuit of collective security, peacekeeping, weapons inspections, the promotion of economic development, global health initiatives, and humanitarian assistance such as famine relief and responding to natural disasters. Its many agencies are also involved in protecting religious, cultural, and historical sites of interest, and the UN has provided a forum for negotiation of disputes between nations as well as for interstate and ethnoreligious conflicts.

[Page 1327]Because of the imperial and colonial nature of the world prior to the advent of the UN in 1945, its predecessor organization, the League of Nations (1919–1945) with its original 29 members, was largely made up of European and Latin American nations. The membership of the UN (1945–), however, includes nations from all over the world representing all the major religions. At its inception in 1945, the 51 founding states of the UN consisted of 42 predominantly Christian states of various denominations; seven predominantly Muslim nations; a nation with a substantial Buddhist population, China, which also joined as a permanent member of the Security Council; and the predominantly Hindu state of India, which was allowed to join in 1945 despite not obtaining complete independence from Britain until 1947. The Jewish state of Israel joined in 1949. Today, the UN's 192 member nations represent an estimated 6 billion people worldwide. Of these, approximately 2 billion (33%) are Christians of various denominations; an estimated 1.2 billion (20%) are Muslims; Hindus constitute 800 million (14%); Buddhists, 300 million (5%); and Jews, approximately 14 million (0.2%).

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proclamation of the Four Freedoms in January 1941 defined “freedom of religion” as one of the chief principles the Allies were fighting for during World War II. This also became one of the foundational ideals of the future UN. One year later, the Declaration of the United Nations of January 1942 defined “religious freedom” as one of the primary war aims of the “United Nations” alliance. These principles related to religious freedom shaped the UN Charter drafted in 1945. The charter (Article 1, Paragraph 3; Chapter IX, Article 55[c]) called for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion and explicitly rejected all forms of discrimination based on religion. Freedom of religion was also defined as one of the principles underlying the creation and composition of the General Assembly (Chapter IV, Article 13). The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights further enshrined freedom of religion. And, in 1981, the General Assembly passed the Declaration on the Elimination of Religious Intolerance. More recently, in the wake of the widespread destruction of mosques and churches during the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the Afghan government's toppling of the giant Buddha statues at Bamiyan (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) in 2001, the UN General Assembly passed the Protection of Religious Sites (May 2001), calling on governments and international organizations to take responsibility for the protection of religious and cultural treasures. Moreover, combating religious discrimination has remained a top priority on the agenda of UN Human Rights Commission and its successor the Human Rights Council.

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