Dear Secretary General:

The Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, as the first women's group to receive consultative status with the United Nations, has long placed hopes for global peace and justice on the U.N. principles and system. Therefore, it is with particular concern and disappointment that WILPF's officers, national sections, and International Committee on Economic Globalization express the organization's opposition to the U.N. Global Compact with Corporations, launched by you in July 2000.

Many of us in the NGO and wider community believe the Compact to be fundamentally flawed to the point of jeopardizing the integrity of the United Nations itself. The lack of prior consultation with the General Assembly before undertaking this "partnership" with for-profit corporate entities, as well as the Compact's vague and voluntary compliance mechanisms, is the wrong process and relationship with the so-called private sector. Agreements with corporations should be clear and enforceable on behalf of the health, welfare and sovereignty of the world's people, and the well being of our natural environment.

Most serious from WILPF's perspective is the very notion of "partnership" with corporations, between "we the peoples of the world" and the corporate form supposedly created to serve us. Human beings and corporate bodies are not equals, as partnership implies. These bodies should be subordinate to people, rather than the present relationship in which corporations and their global institutions increasingly usurp our authority to govern ourselves. As people the world over organize to resist the abuses, exploitation and illegitimate power of corporate institutions, the United Nations is modeling to its member nations and their citizens a misguided notion of partnership that covers corporations with the U.N. stamp of approval.

WILPF's goal is not to dismantle corporations but to place them in the proper relationship to people through democratic processes. Toward this end we urge you to reconsider the U.N. Global Compact with Corporations and instead provide leadership to the growing global struggle for the right relationship with one another and with our institutions -- for peace and justice.