Power in numbers: towards a UN2.0.

Manifesto for the reform of the United Nations Charter and the establishment of a new generation of digital public services.

A few years ago, what appears as a crazy idea crossed our minds. What if we could elect the Secretary General of the United Nations democratically? When we realized the impact such an idea could have, we started to feel the urge to build an infrastructure that could support it, no matter how crazy and difficult it sounded at the time. Since then, we’ve been conducting the experiment along with a few dedicated people. Here is an overview of what we found.

The technology to elect the United Nations Secretary General democratically will exist soon

Even if we had the political support for such a decision (which we do not have), how could we practically organize these global elections? Such a big effort of international cooperation, collaboratively setting up an election taking place in every UN member state — some of which aren’t even democracies — has never been done before.

So, even if we let aside the position of these member states, comes the question of the technology to use. Paper ballots? Even if it remains by far the safest means to date to conduct independent elections, relying on paper in countries where institutions are unstable means that cohorts of observers should be deployed to monitor the election. How can we prevent them to be bribed, at such a big scale? Without even discussing the ecological impact of this solution, how can we prevent the physical integrity of all these ballots, and be absolutely sure they have not been tampered with at any time?

So, with paper elections ruled out, what about e-voting then? E-voting technology has been struck with a staggering problem since its inception. Its objective is to articulate anonymity, secrecy, security and transparency within a single system without relying on third parties. Some examples of the kind of problems these architecture choices pose in a digital voting system can be found here and here.

Blockchain technology and zero-knowledge protocols could provide a model that virtually solves the e-voting problem. Questions remain today around the scalability of such systems, vote coercion prevention and equal access to the election system. But if everything goes well, this technology could be ready soon. It is a big thing.

Now let’s start building something as big as the news.

Reforming Article 97

“The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”

Article 97 of the UN Charter symbolises how the international system was constructed. The strongest will have the last word. As such, the Secretary General will be appointed to incarnate the rule of law, for the sake of international stability.

We believe in the power of the people. We believe democracy means nothing without the rule of law, and vice-versa. We believe even big communities are capable of coming together and speaking as one, and that power resides in numbers.

This is why we dedicated ourselves to the promotion of an amendment of article 97, through the addition of one small sentence:

“The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. Whenever possible, the Security council’s recommendation shall support a candidate that has been independently and democratically elected by the civil society.”

Global governance for a digital age

We need to understand what the e-voting revolution changes for the UN and global history. We define democracy as the combination of four fundamental pillars:

The rule of law

Separation of powers

Equality

Citizen participation

Today, legitimate military power is subject to the decisions of the UN Security Council. This institution is of paramount importance, and yet, the decisions it takes do not comply with these fundamental pillars:

The lack of legally binding power of the General Assembly and UN agencies over its member states vastly restricts UN’s binding decisions to the Security Council and, to some extent, the World Trade Organization;

The Security Council centralizes all the powers of the international order: it passes resolutions (legislative power), assesses whether past resolutions have been violated by a member state (judiciary power), and executes the sentence by mandating other member states to engage military action against rogue states (executive power);

The Security Council distinguishes between permanent members with a veto right (US, Russia, China, UK and France) and non-permanent, rotating members;

Decisions are taken by the representatives of sovereign governments, not by their citizens.

An infrastructure for digital public services

In such a context, we can hardly talk of a democratic international community. Just like what happens in many industrialized, democratic states, the link between citizens and the international institutions seems distant.

This is why we are developing a modular and democratic software tool for global internet elections. Coding a democracy means allowing everyone to vote, but also to let them change the rules if they don’t agree with them. If code is really law, then we need digital governments. We need to code democratic software; not only a civic tool, but a digital democracy, with its separation of powers, binding power, and most importantly, direct, equal input from citizens.

To achieve that, we developed Kelsen, a registry of smart contracts stored on the Ethereum blockchain. It is a list of entries — of other smarts contracts — that can be modified by a given set of users under certain voting rules. These users can add or remove smart contracts that constitute the “official” parts of the system, by running a democratic vote. These rules are stored on the blockchain and listed under the registry; it can thus modify any parts of its own architecture indefinitely and democratically, including front-end interfaces and voting rules.

We soon realized that by drawing this model, we were building the very first bricks of an infrastructure for digital public services. After all, the final goal of this “digital Constitution”, is to institute bricks for digital administrations that deliver services of public interest.

So what kind of public services could it provide? We listed 7 core activities it enables any government to perform online securely, impacting the public life for good:

digital identity and confidential data management

voting & collective decision-making

anticorruption and public registries management

legal graft & official documents issuance

public financial management and budget execution

social security services

Common principle here is to consider public blockchains as public infrastructures that reinforce the rule of law and allow the protection of fundamental human rights in the digital era. As such, they should be maintained and their access should be facilitated by official public authorities. Protection of private and confidential data, secret of correspondence, transparency and accountability of public institutions, all correspond to fundamental human rights and constitutional requirements, whose questioning by internet giants, governments or any other organization constitute serious threats to our democracies.

Our approach

Where should we go from here? Here’s what we’ll be doing in the next months:

Develop a new model for public trust in the internet era, fostering the Ethereum blockchain and the advances in zero-knowledge protocols;

Advocate for the amendment of the international system towards more direct participation of the civil society;

Help any institution build their own incorruptible version of themselves through developing public code, education, tech support and consulting services.

We constituted a team in Paris to advance the technology and help spread the idea. We started with social security; we are now looking for partners to help tackle other target services. Help us push the idea forward:

Share this post on facebook and twitter

Shoot us an email or join our slack;

Contribute to our software, all our code is open-source and distributed under GPL GNU v.3 License, so don’t hesitate to give us a hand !

We won’t make it without you.