UN in Focus Newsbrief N0. 5/2013 Quick Links FES NY Highlights FES NY Publications More About Us 2013 September Dear Colleagues and Friends, It gives me a great pleasure to be able to send out this"UN in Focus" Newsbrief after having started my new assignment to FES New York in August. Let me take this opportunity to thank all of you who gave me such a warm welcome! I am very much looking forward to working with you to strengthen and enhance equitable economic and social development, peace and security, and the reform of global governance institutions. With this month's Newsbrief I would like to inform you about our most recent activities and publications around the UN. As the civil war in Syria threatens to escalate on the international level, we will be co-hosting a timely debate on the Responsibility to Protect on September 9. The Syrian crisis intensified not in the least because two of the UN Security Council's permanent members vetoed resolutions that would have condemned the Syrian regime. Whether or not permanent members of the Council should self-restrict their veto power for the sake of mass atrocity prevention is a topic for debate that is explained in a new FES publication on the reform of the Council's working methods. The second new publication focuses on another set of state actors, namely the so-called Democratic Emerging Powers (DEPs), such as India, Brazil, or South Africa. The authors conclude that DEP governments have prioritized pragmatism over principle so that, similar to the established Western democratic powers, DEPs have turned into inconsistent advocates for democracy and human rights on the international stage. I hope this Newsbrief will make for informative reading