Pope says unilateral acts undermine United Nations

By Philip Pullella

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Countries that act unilaterally on the world stage undermine the authority of the United Nations and weaken the broad consensus needed to confront global problems, Pope Benedict said on Friday.

In a major speech to the U.N. General Assembly, the pope also said the international community sometimes had the duty to intervene when a country could not protect its own people from "grave and sustained violations of human rights."

The pope, who arrived from Washington on the second leg of a six-day U.S. trip, was only the third pontiff in history to address the General Assembly.

Speaking in French and English from the Assembly's green marble podium, he gave a wide-ranging address on issues such as globalization, human rights and the environment.

The international community must be "capable of responding to the demands of the human family through binding international rules," said the 81-year-old pope, who spoke after meeting privately with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

He said the notion of multilateral consensus was "in crisis because it is still subordinated to the decisions of a few, whereas the world's problems call for interventions in the form of collective action by the international community."

While Benedict did not mention any country, this appeared to refer to the United States, which led the 2003 invasion of Iraq despite a Security Council refusal to approve it.

The Vatican strongly opposed the recourse to war.

Benedict, who met U.S. President George W. Bush during his Washington visit, called for "a deeper search for ways of pre-empting and managing conflicts by exploring every possible diplomatic avenue, and giving attention and encouragement to even the faintest sign of dialogue or desire for reconciliation."

In an apparent reference to the conflict in the Sudanese region of Darfur, the pope said every state had the "primary duty" to protect its citizens from human rights violations and humanitarian crises but outside intervention was sometimes justified.

HUMAN RIGHTS

"If states are unable to guarantee such protection, the international community must intervene with the juridical means provided in the United Nations Charter and in other international instruments," he said.

He called human rights "the common language and ethical substratum of international relations," and added that promoting human rights was the best way to eliminate inequalities.

"Indeed, the victims of hardship and despair, whose human dignity is violated with impunity, become easy prey to the call to violence, and they can then become violators of peace," he said in an apparent reference to social causes of terrorism.

Benedict called for religious freedom to be protected against secularist views and against majority religions that sideline other faiths -- an apparent reference to Muslim states where some Christian minorities report discrimination.