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A New Fund for Democracy at the United Nations: Progress, Promise and Pitfalls

Backing democracy advocates in Yemen, Jordan and Morocco. Empowering youth in Romania and Liberia. Battling corruption in Namibia, the Russian Federation and Peru. Increasing the role of women in politics in India and Uganda. Supporting independent media in Iraq, Tajikistan and Sierra Leone. Projects to promote these and other worthy objectives were unveiled recently in New York as the first group of grantees of the UN Democracy Fund: a new and potentially formidable player in the growing field of democracy assistance. The United Nations has long promoted democratic practices among its Members — free elections and the protection of human rights, for example. However, the decision to establish a fund dedicated to that purpose marks the most explicit UN embrace to date of the democracy promotion agenda, one that some governments have viewed with suspicion in the past. In an interview with Politically Speaking, the Fund’s acting director, Magdy Martinez-Soliman of Spain, a former UNDP governance specialist, described the process of establishing the Democracy Fund, while offering his thoughts on both the promise and potential pitfalls of UN democracy assistance.